Six-year-old Amar Lal and his family from the Banjara nomadic tribe in Rajasthan moved from quarry to quarry, breaking stones. School and permanent housing were distant dreams.

But one day in 2001, Lal’s destiny changed when Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi paid a visit to the quarry.

Pic source: Satyarthi.org

The internationally acclaimed child rights activist gave Lal a new lease on life in 2001 by convincing his parents that their child was meant for greater things.

As a lawyer who now advocates for child rights, Lal looks back on that fateful day. “I vividly recall Kailash ji asking my parents whether I went to school. They were perplexed. Not my parents, grandparents or even great-grandparents had ever been to school,” he recalls.

“A nomadic lifestyle was the only one we knew. Work was all we were taught to do,” the 27-year-old lawyer shares.

Lal’s parents decided to trust Satyarthi. In a matter of days, Lal along with his two elder brothers were enrolled into Satyarthi’s balashram (rehabilitation centre for children) in Jaipur.

At the balashram, Lal was given a non-formal education and made friends with others who had suffered from the same fate as him or worse.

“Some of them were trafficked from their families and forced into bonded labour. I was shocked when I heard how some of their friends would be killed by these ‘employers’ because their feet kept slipping while carrying the stones.”

Hearing these stories and observing his mentor Satyarthi’s efforts, Lal decided to follow in his footsteps.

Since Lal graduated as a lawyer in 2018, he has been working with Satyarthi on cases and rescue operations, and in turn, giving hope to many more children.

The gamut of his work involves identifying villages where children don’t go to schools or where child marriage is rampant, and then conducting surveys.

Awareness programmes follow these surveys to encourage the children to understand their rights and bring violations to the notice of the higher authorities. Once these come to light, Lal takes on these cases and defends children wrongly accused of offences.

He encourages people to speak up when they see anomalies in the system.

“I realise I was one of the luckiest children in the world to be given a chance at a new life. I wanted to give other children the same,” he says.