Uzmetronom.com reports that schoolchildren, students, and clerks from Tashkent and Tashkent region are rounded up and dispatched to cotton harvesting.

It may be added that residents of the capital city and its environs were spared the annual harvesting duty of late. Not so residents of the regions and particularly rural areas and kishlaks where all more or less able-bodies citizens are mustered for harvesting every year. Schoolchildren spend every autumn working the fields. Schools themselves are converted into hostels for students brought en masse from Uzbek cities.

Luck is not with residents of Tashkent this year. The enlistment campaign involves students and clerks from state structures alike. According to Uzmetronom.com, at least 3 million citizens of Uzbekistan (mostly children) are forced to work the fields every year. Official information on that score is not available, of course.

"The campaign is getting into high gear," Angela of Tashkent, a clerk with a state organization, said. "If you ask me, the situation with cotton-growing (and not only with it) is getting worse and worse. On a visit to Akhangaran recently I saw cotton fields with low pitiful shrubs. Hence the emergency rush throughout the region now when everyone is rounded up. My organization was ordered to provide 50 persons. The situation being what it is, nobody cares if you are man or woman, healthy or sick. There is an alternative of course: raise money and hire someone else but the required sum is more than we can afford. Say, 50,000 sums which is half of my monthly pay. I reckon that the sum will go down yet. The organization will come up with a part of the final sum and whoever does not want to contribute something will have to go to the fields. We have a guy here who is from Surkhandarja. He says the whole student body of all schools there, including first-formers, are sent to the nearby fields..."

And so it happens that adults and juveniles live in the conditions that are best left unmentioned, drink water from aryks or crooks, and eat whatever passes their way regardless of the food's quality and origin. On their return home, many students discover that they are left without scholarship or that they are expected to pay the allegedly accumulated debts for the failure to meet daily harvesting quotas. "We fed you and clothed you over there. You did not produce enough to justify the expenses," college administration invariably says to all protestations. Most city dwellers assigned to the harvesting duty are convinced that the demanded quotas are impossible to meet. Very many of them resort to all sorts of tricks: bribe cotton weighers or their own professors, buy cotton from dekhkans or peasants and add it to what they themselves harvested, and so on.

Back in the early 1990's, President Islam Karimov condemned the Soviet regime that had dragged kids from schools to cotton fields and left them there harvesting cotton for months on end. He promised that kids in new sovereign Uzbekistan would be going to school and that harvesting would be left strictly to peasants. Article 8 of the Law "Foundations of State Youth Policy of the Republic of Uzbekistan" adopted on November 20, 1991, states in no uncertain terms that schoolchildren and students are not to be distracted from studies unless this participation in social production agrees with the chosen speciality or unless schoolchildren and students do it in their own spare time and of their own volition. Moreover, the legislation demands the drawing of individual contracts with everyone. "All standard acts that collide with the Law are invalidated henceforth..." Article 20 of the law makes the Oly Majlis (national parliament), Kengashes (councils of people's deputies), and state structures responsible for implementation of the law. All the same, schoolchildren and students begin preparations for the upcoming harvesting season every August - finagling medical certificates that will absolve them or buying canned meat to take with them.

Tajik kids are better off. No more cotton harvesting for them, according to what President of Tajikistan Emomali Rakhmonov said to the Cabinet on September 12.