Stolen Childhoods Steve Mc Curry

 
India

For the past three decades as I traveled the world on assignment I
 have witnessed children working in fields, factories, ditches, tunnels,
mines, and ship-breaking yards.

 
Kabul, Afghanistan

The scope of the problem is vast.
Hundreds of millions of children spend their 
childhood working and do not have an opportunity to
play, go to school, or live in a healthy environment.

India

 
India

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, 
and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty,
you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.
 -  Grace Abbott

Yemen

 
India

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies is, 
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
– Dwight David Eisenhower

          Philippines

Afghanistan

 
Nepal

The object of employing children is not to train them,
but to get high profits from their work.
- Lewis Hine, 1908

Mali
Woman and her slave

 
Burma

There is no trust more sacred than the one the world holds with children.
There is no duty more important than ensuring that their rights are respected,
that their welfare is protected, that their lives are free from fear and want
and that they can grow up in peace.
- Kofi Annan

Mali

 
Niger

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets,
the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
- Anna Quindlen

Tibet

India

Burma

Kabul, Afghanistan

Nepal

The real solution is to improve the incomes of the poor and
provide their children with decent education.
- Carol Bellamy

India 

Child labour must not become the nation’s social safety net.
- Kailash Satyarthi

 
 Bangladesh

There is no room for complacency when 215 million children are still labouring to survive and
more than half of these are exposed to the worst forms of child labour, including slavery and
involvement in armed conflict. We cannot allow the eradication of child labour
to slip down the development agenda — all countries should be striving to
achieve this target, individually and collectively.
- Juan Somavia

Afghanistan

Kandahar, Afghanistan

Greenpeace drops anchor in India, serves notice to industry

 What happens when a given vessel – cruise ship, container ship, oil tanker, or anything – isn’t worth refitting? If you’re the former soviet navy, you dump it an empty bay to rust away. Private enterprise is usually a bit more motivated to recoup salvage dollars, however – giant ships are after all giant repositories of recyclable metals that are worth something if they can be recovered cheaply enough.

And that’s where a process called “shipbreaking” begins. Ships are pushed up onto third-world beaches where armies of subsistence-wage laborers cut them apart in generally dangerous fashion. The beaches are wastelands of pollution – oil, chemicals, and rust – and the work is as dangerous as you’d think it would be – blowtorches, jagged metal, 100ft drops, and fuel tanks full of explosive vapors conspire to kill or injure many shipbreakers every year. Here’s a quote that highlights the issues around one example, the French warship Clemenceau, decommissioned in the seventies, and pictured above:

 

    …environmental activists of Greenpeace and other organizations managed to break the tight security and board the ship to shout slogans against it being sent to India, where impoverished workers would break down the toxic ship, with its 500+ tonnes of asbestos. 

 Greenpeace, the international environmental campaign group, is seeing red over the ''harm being caused to the environment by polluting industries in India''.

(…)

In Alang, at the ship-breaking yard, the Greenpeace campaigners tied themselves to the anchor chains of the vessels that had come in to berth. (See the photograph alongside. Click on it for a bigger image.) These "dirty" vessels have not been decontaminated, and contain dangerous substances like asbestos and heavy-metal-based paints. "We don't want to harm 40,000 jobs, but we also want a clean industry," said Jayaraman.

Jayaraman said that Greenpeace was fully aware of the strong conflict between the lobbies representing 'clean environment' and 'jobs'. "But we are prepared for this. In the long run, a 'dirty' industry would cost us dearly: both, the jobs and the environment will be lost," he said.

Greenpeace is concerned over what it sees as the havoc-potential of poly-vinyl chlorides, or PVCs, which are considered among the most-hazardous chemicals in circulation.

 

The environmental group recently backed citizens in Goa protesting against the setting up of a copper waste recycling plant in their village, Sancoale, pointing to the risks posed by PVCs in production, use and disposal.

Villagers were literally up in arms, when Greenpeace stepped in to support them in an agitation against Meta Strips. One policeman died after being attacked by infuriated villagers, while three villagers were shot-at by the cops.

"Chemicals from the chlorine class are very persistent. They don't disappear over time. They're toxic, poisonous in a variety of ways. They can play havoc for a very long time after their release," said Jayaraman. (...)