Child labour

 

Children are the gifts of God. They are to be protected, nurtured and moulded into a personality they would want to be. They are as delicate as a petal of a rose, but with that softness comes the liability of being crushed. If guided well, they can lead the future. Nowadays, children, to be precise, kidnapped children, homeless children, orphan children, they are all directed to manual labour. It may be begging on the streets or working on a construction site, which is no place to be for a minor. 

Children are the future. But when instead of helping them discover themselves, they are directed to labour it indirectly affects the growth of the country. Children, they need to play, they need to fall and learn to get up, they need to enjoy being a kid. But with child labour, this all is just a dream. Even now, there are those children, who are working hard day and night, just so they could eat one times food, those children who are studying from the worn-out books, from whom you can barely read. 

Roughly 160 million children were subjected to child labour at the beginning of 2020, with 9 million additional children at risk due to the impact of COVID-19. This accounts for nearly 1 in 10 children worldwide. Almost half of them are in hazardous work that directly endangers their health and development.

Children may be driven into work for various reasons. Most often, child labour occurs when families face financial challenges or uncertainty – whether due to poverty, sudden illness of a caregiver, or job loss of a primary wage earner.

The consequences are staggering. Child labour can result in extreme bodily and mental harm, and even death. It can lead to slavery and sexual or economic exploitation. And in nearly every case, it cuts children off from schooling and health care, restricting their fundamental rights.

 

But we’re talking about work after school, so why children might not help out to increase the family income? Shantha Sinha, former head of the Indian National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights and renowned children's activist of the MV Foundation, says in an article: "It is the kind of work that starts before and after school hours until late in the night at the cost of children’s health until they can no longer concentrate in the classroom or participate in school and are branded as slow learners. Unable to straddle both school and work, these children are forced to give up the former." Moreover, the MV Foundation itself showed profusely proven that it is possible through dedicated local mobilization and organization to get all children in certain areas to school and keep them there. Through this so-called Child Labour Free Zone approach they have reached more than 1 million children.

About ‘family work’ in the new law Sinha says: "The Bill does not seek to justify routine family work, but the work that millions of children render in home-based units," citing the many forms of outsourced work to which children contribute. How poignant the relation between missing out on education and various forms of child labour becomes also clear from research: on an average school day only 71% of the enrolled children is actually in school. According to the same study, the consequences are disastrous for even the basic literacy and numeracy knowledge of many children.

Child labour before and after school also continues and reinforces extreme forms of exploitation of families under the pretext of: there is plenty of cheap children available, so why pay more to adults.

Not just the child rights activists but also the Indian parliamentary commission that reviewed the law is very critical on ‘family work' after school: “The Committee is not able to understand as to how the Ministry proposes to keep a check on children working in their homes. The Ministry is itself provides loopholes by inserting this provision since it would be very difficult to make out whether children are merely helping their parents or are working to supplement the family income.”

shelter as well as to pay off debt that their parents owe. Some children, meanwhile, are sold into slavery against their will.

PROFESSIONAL NEEDS:

There are some industries such as the ‘bangle making’ industry, where delicate hands and little fingers are needed to do very minute work with extreme excellence and precision. An adult’s hands are usually not so delicate and small, so they require children to work for them and do such dangerous work with glass. This often resulted in major eye accidents of the children.

NO SPACE FOR ALTERNATIVES 

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), a significant contributing factor that pushes children into hazardous labour is a lack of available alternatives, such as affordable schools and high-quality education. Children are bound to work because they are dissatisfied and have no other means of earning. There are not enough acceptable school facilities in many localities, especially rural ones where child labour is rampant. Even when schools are available, they are frequently too far away, challenging to reach, expensive, or the quality of instruction is so low that parents question whether attending school is actually worthwhile. Even after 75 years of independence, there are still a number of children whose right to education is denied owing to their situations. This can only be managed by the effective implementation of national schemes.