“Do you know that I had to burn my slippers because we ran out of wood for fuel for the kitchen stove,” she sighs in exasperation.

Her neighbour, Rat Rani, mother of five daughters, doesn’t know what to tell her children when they complain of discrimination at school. “When my girls wear proper clothes, they say, ‘Why are your wearing clean clothes. You are a former Kamaiya,’ and when they wear dirty clothes, their teachers scold them for not changing their ways,” she says.

Mamta Devi and Rat Rani are freed Kamaiyas from Dhangadi, Kailali, who were emancipated from bonded labour 14 years ago. Their individual stories reflect a collective frustration. They say they might have been liberated in the political sense, but they still haven’t been able to make their way into mainstream society. They are struggling to integrate into the larger society mainly because they lack the skills and means to ensure a proper livelihood. And because of that, an array of social problems—such as depression and parents’ marrying off their children in child marriages—has spread across the Kamaiya settlements in mid-western Nepal.

It was such problems that brought the former bonded labourers to Kathmandu recently to meet government officials and demand action. The Kamaiyas, along with Kamlaris (former bonded domestic labourers) have given a 35-day ultimatum, which is set to expire in two weeks, to the government, stating that they will take to picketing if it does not come up with a concrete plan to tackle the issue. Their 18-point demand, which asks the government to form a high-level committee to deal with the issue, asks that the government raise the entitlement amount, create identity cards to the remaining unidentified freed Kamaiyas and provide education opportunities.

The government has promised to solve all the pertinent issues within two years, but lawmaker Dilli Bahadur Chaudhary, who is also a prominent activist for the Kamaiya cause, says a two-year time stamp could just stall the issue. “We want immediate actions. We’ve waited too long,” he says.

According to Churna Chaudhary, executive director of BASE Nepal, an NGO that has been working with Kamaiyas for the last two decades, government initiatives in the past had helped many families, but lack of proper local governance and missing mechanisms to monitor the growth stalled progress.  

So far, the government seems to have offered only piecemeal solutions. Right after their emancipation, the freed Kamaiyas did not have anywhere to live and would sleep outside temples and on the roads.  A few years later, the government identified the former Kaimayas and provided them with identity cards, five kathas of land, and entitlement amounts of 10,000 along with 35 cubic meters of wood to build houses. But, Churna says, that effort was not enough to uplift the status of the community as a whole.  He says a little over 2,000 of the 37,000 Kamaiyas still haven’t received their cards. This is because these 2,000 Kamaiyas do not appear on the government’s list. For those who did receive their allotted piece of land, most turned out to be infertile, or were located next to rivers, making them unsuitable for irrigation. These problems, coupled with the actions of corrupt officials—who prevented them from receiving the entire entitlement amounts of Rs 150,000, which the government had announced they would get in 2012—have led to the Kamaiyas’ increasingly distrusting authorities.

To ensure proper integration, Churna says, the government needs to look beyond short-lived actions and start programmes that work for the long-term. For this, he says, there are two crucial issues that need to be addressed—providing employment opportunities and education.

A number of international organisations and government programmes have provided skill-based training for both men and women, but Churna says three months of training is not enough to guarantee empowerment. They need to create employment opportunities for them. “The freed Kamaiyas should be given a chance to become a capable workforce; to become people who can compete in the market to get jobs, not remain merely recipients of symbolic programmes,” he says.

As for education, Churna says the government has to take full responsibility of the Kamlaris and other children of Kamaiyas.  “If the fee is 50,000, then the government should make sure that it pays the entire amount because a Kamlari or the child of a Kamaiya can’t afford partial scholarships,” he says. “We are dealing with a community that has had to start from ground zero, so of course they need total support, that extra push.”

The Kamaiyas are of the opinion that if they are provided with education and employment opportunities, they will be able to ease into society, but right now, the fact that they do not have a source of stable livelihood means that they are languishing in ennui and despair.

Living in a state of stasis has led to one particularly alarming trend: the rise in child marriages. “Because of poverty, ex Kamaiyas are marrying their children off instead of sending them to schools,” says Churna.

Many Kamaiyas are dealing with their frustration by turning to alcoholism and violence. And the fact that many of them live in camp settlements further fuels their sense of helplessness and hopelessness.

It is this sense of hopelessness that has caused many freed Kamaiyas to return to their previous landowners. Bardia’s Suman Shah (name changed), who belongs to a family of landowners, says the freed Kamaiyas who had worked for them had returned to seek employment. The Freed Kamaiya Development Forum has told reporters that ex Kamaiyas have been compelled to return to their former landlords because the land provided by the government was too infertile to grow crops. “You can’t just free them and expect them to work it out on their own. They need guidance to transition into society,” says Shah, who is also a psychosocial counselor.

According to her, a majority of the ex Kamaiyas she knew joined the Maoist movement, which led  to the members of the larger society not viewing them in better light. “Communities at the lowest spectrum of poverty are the most vulnerable ones at such times and this is what happened to the Kamaiyas,” she says. They got caught in the political movement and continue to struggle for a secure future.

“Freed Kamaiyas have been transported from one place to another, in isolation,” says Shankar Malakar, programme manager at the Centre for Mental Health and Counseling—Nepal, which trains social workers of local organisations to protect children and families affected by conflict. And, he says, because the remnants of feudalism still exist in people’s minds, freed Kamaiyas are still not seen as equals by other members of society.