ban on child labor

India passed a far-reaching legislation last week. It banned the employment of children under 14 in all domestic households, all roadside tea shops and other hotels and restaurants. Many people feel that while it is really difficult to monitor all such areas where children are routinely employed, this legislation will give teeth to the drive to stop this practice.

Heres my question though, what happens to all the children that are rescued from this fate of having to work countless hours without an opportunity to go to school or move ahead in life? What India needs is a system, strongly supported by the common man, a system in which disadvantaged children are taken care of. They are sent to school, and provided avenues for growth and given all the facilities that will give them a childhood that most of us reading this blog have had.

The economics behind the employment of children in this industries is very strong and very compelling. Children need to go to work to support their poor, and in most cases, large families. Their work gets food on the table, and it will take something drastic and large scale to replace this system.

Law enforcement was never really any Indian government's forte, and I am certain they will consider it their job done with the passing of this legislation. Follow-up is a word unknown in the government dictionary.

Shyamal Majumdar: Child labour ban: If wishes were horses...


As long as the little worker is a mouth less for poor families to feed, the law will continue to be flouted.

The NGOs are euphoric and the government hasn’t stopped congratulating itself for this wonderful piece of legislation. Last week, India, home to the world’s largest number of child labourers (the official estimate is 11 million though the actual figure is over 75 million), banned children from working as domestic servants or at hotels, tea shops, restaurants and resorts.

These sectors now have roughly 60 days to sack their little labourers. The latest ban is merely an extension of the existing law — the Child Labour Act, 1986 — under which children are prohibited from working in hazardous industrial units.

“If wishes were horses, law could change men’s minds,” says a former official in the Maharashtra labour department. He gives three documents that give a graphic description of how the law is flouted openly even 20 years after it came into effect.

The first is an ANI report on the stone quarries in West Bengal’s Siliguri district, where hundreds of children, driven by hunger and poverty, are forced to engage in stone crushing activity. “Children spend eight hours a day by the riverside, fishing out stones and breaking them into gravel with hand tools twice the size of their tiny hands. Most of these kids are the crucial breadwinners for their even younger siblings,” the report says.

Employed through contract companies, they lose a sizeable chunk of their money to middlemen, ultimately earning a meagre amount which is not enough to buy them even one complete meal.

The second example is of a slaughter house at Parbhani, a small town in Maharashtra. Over half of the workers at the slaughter house were children aged between six and 14. They had to cut, skin and break the bones of cattle. Some had to even blow into the spleen of the dead cattle. They were rescued and put into coaching classes not by the law-enforcing authorities but by SETU, an NGO, and Unicef.

A report brought out by the two organisations quotes the children as saying that they had to force the animals down with their tiny hands and then cut it. One of the children, aged 10, said it was horrible to hear the screams of the animals.

The third example is a study by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions on child labour in Sivakasi. The children, who are paid Rs 15-18 a day, are used to dye outer paper, make small firecrackers, roll the powder and pack the final product. What makes identification difficult is that they work in unlicensed fireworks factories working under sub-contracts. Managers employing children either register their age as being above 14 or do not register them at all. Another NGO, Development Action for Women in Need, highlights the hazards of dealing with poisonous materials such as sulphur, salt peter, barium and strontium nitrates, and says it has noted underdevelopment of the uterus in young girls who squat for long hours making paper rolls.

These three heart-rending examples of open violation of the law are reasons why there is so much of cynicism about the effectiveness of the latest ban.

That legislation can have only a negligible impact is apparent from the fact that child labour is nothing but a by-product of grinding poverty. These children are holding out a slim lifeline to impoverished families, or are just trying to keep themselves from starvation. For example, in about 60 per cent of the Sivakasi households with working children, two-thirds of the total income is contributed by children.

The dilemma is similar to that of the ban on dance bars in Mumbai on the grounds that it would put an end to the exploitation of these women. What happened to those 70,000-odd bar girls after the ban? Some became prostitutes, some went back home only to be ostracised and some committed suicide.
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The situation is much, much graver than we think it is. For us, seeing a working child is very commonplace, and we think nothing of it. We need to change that attitude, and I am hoping that the passing of this legislation will bring renewed interest and efforts into getting our children out of these conditions and giving them a childhood that they deserve.

We know the government can't do jack shit. The Human Resources Development ministry never really has been a doer, in fact, its always been a tool for the government to put its propaganda into the mainstream, and currently, it is led by a senile, wily old man who does not give a damn about the future of this country. The common citizens have to get together and tell themselves to not employ children in their households. But our first priority should be to get the millions of children out of the stone quarries, fireworks factories and slaughter houses. O Lord make us see the light.