Indian Premier League : Missing in action

Brendon McCullum, Mike Hussey and Matthew Hayden, the stars of the IPL who have shone the brightest so far, will be missing in action soon. Players from Australia, West Indies and New Zealand won't be available to play in the IPL for the entire duration as Australia and West Indies are involved in a bilateral series while New Zealand tour England. The Australians are expected to play till the end of April before heading for a pre-series training camp in Brisbane while the New Zealand IPL players were allowed to miss the tour games in England but will nonetheless have to join the squad by May 1.
Deccan Chargers :For VVS Laxman's Chargers, the coming weeks will see the departure of a big-ticket player in Andrew Symonds, who was priced No. 2 in the auction. Though he is yet to fire, it can be expected that he will show his class soon. While his departure, on May 1, means the Chargers will miss his allround skills, they do have Shahid Afridi and Scott Styris to fill that vacuum. Also, Herschelle Gibbs, in the bench currently, can, in theory, match up to Symonds' hitting prowess. So the next ten days could add another punch to Deccan's charge.

Kolkata Knight Riders:Sourav Ganguly's team will be the worst hit by the exodus. Ricky Ponting, McCullum and Chris Gayle, though he is yet to play due to injury, will be missing in action soon. Ponting will leave on May 1, McCullum on April 30 while the injured Gayle, even if he gets fit, will have to leave on May 15. These are big shoes to fill as Ponting is a proven commodity and McCullum became the first superstar of the IPL with a whirlwind record 158 on the opening night. They will look to the Pakistan opener Salman Butt and Zimbabwe's Tatenda Taibu to try plugging the big hole but it remains to be seen how effective they will be. Butt averages only 15.42 at a strike-rate of 81.20 in eight Twenty20 internationals and 16.62 at a strike-rate of 95 from 17 domestic Twenty20 games. Taibu averages 15.70 from 10 domestic Twenty20 matches but the runs have come at a fair clip of 122.65. Perhaps, Mohammad Hafeez will be pushed up the order. There is some good news for Kolkata, as the Pakistani seamer Umar Gul, who has joined the squad, will beef up the bowling.

Bangalore Royal Challengers:Shivnarine Chanderpaul is leaving on May 15 while Ashley Noffke and Ross Taylor leave on May 1 but the Royal Challengers won't be hit too hard. Misbah-ul-Haq, who has made Twenty20 his calling card, arrived on April 23 and Dale Steyn, who had a triumphant Test series against India, will be coming on April 27. Both are better players than Taylor and Noffke respectively but Chanderpaul will be missed as an opener. Wasim Jaffer looked out of place in the first game and Bangalore might decide to open with Praveen Kumar, who has opened in domestic cricket in the limited-overs format. The management is hopeful that the injured Bracken will get fit in time to replace Noffke. Even without him, they have a decent bowling line-up in Praveen , Zaheer Khan, Steyn and Anil Kumble, who is expected to get fit soon.

Chennai Super Kings:Hayden and Hussey leave on May 1 while Jacob Oram catches the flight on April 30 but they will be replaced by Stephen Fleming and the big-hitting South African allrounder Albie Morkel, who arrives on April 27. While Fleming, if he gets going, can make up for Hayden's absence at the top of the order, Albie can be expected to more than adequately replace Oram. But they will miss Hussey, who hit the fastest ton in the tournament - a 50-ball effort in the first game- in the middle order. However, the bowling will get better as they will have Makhaya Ntini coming in on April 27. Chennai has an inexperienced bowling attack that includes Palani Amarnath and Manpreet Goni but they have stood up to be counted. With Albie and Ntini in, it will only get better.

Delhi Daredevils:Daniel Vettori leaves on April 30 but Daredevils are going to get stronger with the inclusion of AB de Villiers, who joins the team on April 27. If the situation warrants an extra bowler or a batsman, de Villiers can don the wicketkeeping gloves as well. If they come across a wicket that aids spin, they might consider playing the legspinner Amit Mishra.

Kings XI Punjab: Brett Lee, Simon Katich and Kyle Mills will leave India on April 28. Lee's absence will really hit them hard, considering they don't have a foreign player of such class in the squad. Either VRV Singh, the Indian Test bowler, or the Under-19 bowler Ajitesh Argal will have to step up unless Tom Moody, the coach, decides to pick an Australian domestic player. Mills is yet to play in a game, and though Katich did play the first match, he is not known for big hitting and his absence won't leave a hole.

Mumbai Indians:Only Dwayne Bravo will miss out as he is leaving on May 15 to play in the home series against Australia. The allrounder Dominic Thornely, who was hit on the forehead by a Zaheer Khan bouncer and didn't play the second game against Chennai Super Kings, is expected to be fit for the third game. Mumbai will also have the services of the hard-hitting South African batsman Loots Bosman, who is set to join the squad on April 24.

Rajasthan Royals: No one is leaving and instead they will be bolstered by the arrival of Graeme Smith, Younis Khan, Sohail Tanveer and Dimitri Mascarenhas. Smith will add some much-needed solidity to the fragile top order while Younis will bolster the middle order. Mohammad Kaif has struggled at the top and Darren Lehmann has looked out of touch, so Smith and Younis could well replace them. Mascarenhas, who will be available to play in the IPL from May 12 to 26, is a perfect fit for Twenty20 - he proved his big-hitting abilities when he struck Yuvraj for five consecutive sixes in a one-day match last year. Tanveer, a niggardly left-arm seamer, can bat as well and will add an extra dimension to the squad.

Stop Child Slavery: Child Labor & Trafficking in India

In 2004 a very small-budget independent film called "I Am" caused some worldwide buzz. It was awarded Grand Prize at the international Children’s Film Festival in Athens, came to the attention of the Australian press where it ran as a major story in The Age newspaper, and was even featured on the Oprah Winfrey show.
But I Am was no ordinary movie. Besides the fact that it was made entirely by children - directed by Ashikul Islam, filmed by Sahiful Mondal and starring only kids - these young award-winning filmmakers are all residents of a home for destitute boys in Kolkata, India (formerly Calcutta). These boys have all come a long way from their early childhoods.

Sahiful was put into indentured slave labor at the age of four, after his father died of tuberculosis. With their mother suffering from mental illness it fell to this tiny boy and his siblings to somehow put food into their mouths. Sahiful’s first job was agricultural work, crushing hard earth with a brick. The backbreaking work earned him the equivalent of 20 cents per day. Due to the seasonal nature of the work, in the off season he was put to work tending goats from sunrise to sunset. For this he earned two portions of rice per day. When he once lost a goat under his watch, his employer beat him and refused him food for two days.
Today Sahiful’s life is very different. Rescued at the age of six and brought to Muktaneer, which means “Open Sky” in Hindi, his life was freed from exploitation. There he began receiving four good meals a day, was given his own bed and was allowed to play for the first time in his life. He began attending school and his family was also provided assistance.
“Before I lived here, I didn’t study, I didn’t go to school,” Sahiful told me when I visited Muktaneer Home last March. “When I came here, I can go to school. I learned about photo and film. Swapan gave me a camera, and I took one photo, and from there I learned all about filmmaking. It was my dream to make a movie.”
Sahiful’s background is a common story at Muktaneer, where most of the boys came from slave labor conditions or had been kidnapped and sold. Muktaneer is an initiative of the Centre for Communication and Development (CCD), founded in 1978 to assist vulnerable children. Swapan Mukherjee is the Secretary of CCD, which initially focused on education.Then in 1995, an explosion in a Kolkata fireworks factory killed 23 children who were working there illegally. The factory employed only children – 1,500 of them, working from 6am to 6 pm for an average weekly wage of 65 rupees, about $1.50. The explosion rocked the entire surrounding area. Trees were uprooted and concrete pillars along with children’s bodies were tossed in the air and landed in a nearby pond.
The factory owners were not fined for employing illegal child labor nor otherwise charged for the deaths or unsafe working conditions. Swapan was outraged. “The factory refused all responsibility for the tragedy,” he tells me, disbelief still in his voice twelve years later. Ultimately, Swapan himself took the factory owners to court and won a judgment for compensation to all the victims’ families. “From there we moved to a focus on child protection and safety,” he recounts.
As the work continued Swapan contacted Amnesty International, Equality Now, and other human rights organizations for assistance. In 2000 the Muktaneer Children’s Home was opened so that the children who did not have a home to return to, or whose families were too poor to care for them, would have a place to live. Since that time CCD has been integral in bringing 54 child traffickers before the courts for prosecution and has rescued almost 2,000 children from a horrific array of abusive situations, including mutilation by begging rings to make them more effective at soliciting alms.
As Swapan investigated these incidences and recovered children he was photographing and filming the children’s conditions, their lives and their rescues to have as records for proof and documentation. “The children were fascinated by the camera,” he says. “They wanted to document their own lives, tell their own stories.” And so their dreams, into a new life, were born.
Sahiful’s dreams came true, but another twelve to one hundred million child laborers in India may never get such a chance. Circumstances such as the ones Ashikul was plucked out of, those of child trafficking, indentured servitude, factory labor and the sex trade, comprise an “industry” that huge numbers of children fall victim to, disappearing into an underground world. The conditions these children are forced into essentially amount to nothing more than slavery, two hundred years after legislation was passed which made the practice illegal. And this is slavery at its ugliest, most evil core, slavery of the most vulnerable among us: children.
Child laborers and prostitutes exist in such large numbers for a very simple, yet horrific, reason: they are cheap commodities. Children cost less than cattle; a cow or buffalo costs an average 20,000 rupees, but a child can be bought and traded like an animal for 500 to 2,000 rupees. They can be paid the least, exploited the most, and due to their largely invisible status have virtually no power against their oppressors.
While factories in China and Central America that exploit children are often in the news, India is the largest example of a country plagued by this human rights abuse, with the highest number of child laborers in the world. Official estimates of these children vary greatly, often by definition of who such children are. The UNICEF website reports 12.6 million children engaged in hazardous occupations, but this figure is according to the official 2001 Census; because more than half of all children born in India are never registered and records are not kept or reported on child workers, it may safely be assumed that this number is extremely low. The official Indian government figure, based on a 1984 Labour of Ministry survey, is 44 million. At the other end of the spectrum Human Rights Watch estimates between 60 and 115 million , and Global March Against Child Labor contends that as many as 100 million children are believed to be working, “many under conditions akin to slavery,” with an estimated fifteen million in bonded servitude. Bonded labor or servitude is defined as child labor in which children are indentured in order to pay off a debt. Few sources of traditional credit or bank loans exist for those living in poverty. The earnings of the bonded children are less than the interest on these informal loans, ensuring that they will typically never be able to pay off the debt. Thus, they become in effect a slave of the “employer.”
Often families themselves place children in such conditions when they feel they have no other choice. Many unsophisticated parents fall prey to promises by recruiters that their children will do light work, go to school, be exposed to more opportunities in the city, and send money back home. They’re even told the child will have better marriage possibilities. Living in poor rural villages without many prospects, these families believe the child will have a better future. However, the reality is that most of these children are virtually enslaved, abused, and send very little if any money home. Sometimes the family never even sees the child again. A recent study by Save The Children found that most child domestic workers labor up to fifteen hours a day with little break for less than twelve US dollars per month. Fully half of them are given no leave time and 37% never see their families.
Extensive research in the Kolkata area by Save The Children found that 68% of child domestic workers had suffered physical abuse and nearly 90% had been victims of sexual abuse. In 2001 an eleven-year-old domestic worker burst from her master’s home, her little body ablaze, after he set her on fire. A neighbor put the fire out with palm mats and the girl was taken to the hospital, where she later died. A royal couple in another district brought an eight-year-old orphan boy into their palace compound to work; he was later rescued, suffering from malnutrition and extreme injuries from physical torture, including fractures and severe burn wounds. The boy reported to authorities that he slept with the household dogs and was once thrown from the palace roof.
Last year a highly publicized case received tremendous attention when a 10 year old domestic worker in Mumbai was murdered by her affluent employers. The girl, Sonu, was reported as a suicide to police, who arrived at the suburban home to find her body hanging from the ceiling fan. An investigation, however, revealed that Sonu had been beaten and then left to bleed to death by her mistress. Her crime? She had been caught by the employer’s daughter trying on lipstick from the dressing table. When the truth came out it caused an uproar in the media. Sonu became a sort of poster child against domestic child labor and possibly spurred on October 2006 legislation which extended the child labor ban to domestic, hotel and restaurant work.
Om Prakash Gurjar is an inspiring example of a former child slave who is now working himself to affect change for other children. Once a bonded laborer working in the fields to repay his grandfather’s debt, Om Prakash was rescued by activists and taken to live at Bal Ashram, a rehabilitation center for working children. In school the teenage boy quickly rose to first of his class and got involved in cricket and theater arts. Back in his home village Om Prakash single-handedly implemented the Bal Mitra Gram program to make the village child labor free. In 2006 he was honored with the world’s most prestigious award for children – the International Children’s Peace Prize. Om Prakash traveled to Netherlands to receive the award from former South African President F.W. DeKlerk. “I will work to support the families of child labourers,” he says, “so that the children can go to school and enjoy their childhood.