The production of "oriental
carpets' in South Asia developed rapidly after children were
banned from the industry in Iran in the 1970s. International
government and non-governmental agencies carried out research
in the 1980s showing that hand-knotted carpet production in
South Asia was characterized by the involvement of large numbers
of children. More worrying was the fact that many of the children
were victims of debt bondage or forced labour, practices banned
by the United Nations and the International Labour Office and
condemned as contemporary forms of slavery.
While information about child labour in the carpet industry became widely available, a practical solution still took a long time to move from dream to reality. By the late 1980s, Kailash Satyarthi, Chairman of the South Asian Coalition on Children in Servitude, was leading the campaign to free bonded children from the carpet industry and was conducting raids to rescue and rehabilitate them. However, Satyarthi recognized that no matter how many children were liberated one by one, others would take their place at the looms unless something could be done to create a disincentive to employ children in the industry as a whole. In 1990 a consumer awareness campaign was initiated in Germany with the help of trade unions, religious and human rights organizations, and consumer groups. The campaign quickly spread to other European countries and the U.S. The impact was significant and led to the formation of a partnership among development and human rights organizations, companies exporting carpets from India, the Indo-German Export Promotion Council, and UNICEF-India. Together these agencies set up a project to devise and regulate a special label for hand-knotted carpets made without the use of child labour. In September 1994 the RUGMARK Foundation was formally established to supervise the label and, at the beginning of 1995, the first carpets bearing the RUGMARKTM were exported from India, mainly to Germany. In 1995 and 1999, RUGMARK expanded its certification and rehabilitation activities to Nepal and Pakistan. Consumer countries actively promoting the RUGMARK include England, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Canada, and the United States. As of January 2001, more than 2 million carpets bearing the RUGMARK have been sold to Europe and North America. |
