CHILD
LABOUR 2022
What is CHILD LABOUR?
Child labour is done by any working child who is under the age
specified by law. The word, “work” means full time commercial work to
sustain self or add to the family income. Child labor is a hazard to a
Child’s mental, physical, social, educational, emotional and spiritual
development. Broadly any child who is employed in activities to feed
self and family is being subjected to “child labour’.
CHILD LABOUR TODAY?
Child labour is a very complicated development issue, effecting human
society all over the world. It is a matter of grave concern that children are
not receiving the education and leisure which is important for their growing
years, because they are sucked into commercial and laborious activities
which is meant for people beyond their years. According to the statistics
given by ILO and other official agencies 73 million children between 10 to
14 years of age are employed in economic activities all over the world. The
figure translates into 13.2 of all children between 10 to 14 being subjected
to child labour.
CHILD LABOUR IN OTHER COUNTRIES
In India 14.4 % children between 10 and 14 years of age are employed in
child labour.
Bangladesh 30.1%,
China 11.6%,
Pakistan 17.7%,
Turkey 24%,
Egypt 11.2%,
Kenya 41.3%,
Nigeria 25.8%,
Argentina 4.5%,
Brazil 6.1%,
Mexico 6.7%,
Italy 0.4%,
Portugal 1.8%.
CHILD LABOUR IN INDIA
Child labour in India is a human right issue for the whole world. It is a
serious and extensive problem, with many children under the age of
fourteen working in carpet making factories, glass blowing units and
making fireworks with bare little hands. According to the statistics given by
Indian government there are 20 million child laborers in the country, while
other agencies claim that it is 50 million.
The situation of child laborers in India is desperate. Children work for eight
hours at a stretch with only a small break for meals. The meals are also
frugal and the children are ill nourished. Most of the migrant children who
cannot go home, sleep at their work place, which is very bad for their health
and development. Seventy five percent of Indian population still resides in
rural areas and are very poor.
Children in rural families who are ailing with poverty perceive their children
as an income generating resource to supplement the family income.
Parents sacrifice their children’s education to the growing needs of their
younger siblings in such families and view them as wage earners for the
entire clan.
CAUSES OF CHILD LABOUR
Some common causes of child labor are poverty, parental illiteracy, social
apathy, ignorance, lack of education and exposure, exploitation of cheap
and unorganized labor. The family practice to inculcate traditional skills in
children also pulls little ones inexorably in the trap of child labor, as they
never get the opportunity to learn anything else.
Adult unemployment and urbanization also causes child labor. Adults often
find it difficult to find jobs because factory owners find it more beneficial to
employ children at cheap rates. This exploitation is particularly visible in
garment factories of urban areas. Adult exploitation of children is also seen
in many places. Elders relax at home and live on the labor of poor helpless
children.
The industrial revolution has also had a negative effect by giving rise to
circumstances which encourages child labor. Sometimes multinationals
prefer to employ child workers in the developing countries. This is so
because they can be recruited for less pay, more work can be extracted
from them and there is no union problem with them. This attitude also
makes it difficult for adults to find jobs in factories, forcing them to drive
their little ones to work to keep the fire burning their homes.
CHILD LABOUR LAWS
The Indian constitution categorically states that child labor is a wrong
practice, and standards should be set by law to eliminate it. The child labor
act of 1986 implemented by the government of India makes child labor
illegal in many regions and sets the minimum age of employment at
fourteen years.
Child labour is a reality in spite of all the steps taken by the legal machinery
to eliminate it. It prevails and persists as a world phenomenon in spite of
child labor laws.
The causes of child labor in the contemporary world are the same as those
in U.S. hundred years ago- namely poverty, lack of education and
exposure, poor access to education, suppression of workers’ rights, partial
prohibition of child labor and inadequate enforcement of child labour laws.
Moreover certain sectors like agriculture and domestic work are not
included in the exemption of child labor. In some countries very strict child
labor laws exist but the offices and departments responsible for
implementing them are underfunded and under staffed. The judicial
machinery and courts are also found to be faltering and faulting where
proper enforcement of such laws is concerned. Many state governments
are feisty in allocating resources to enforce child labor laws.
There are also many loop holes while setting laws and rules for child labor
which allows exploitation. For example in Nepal, the minimum age for a
person to go for work is 14 years, but plantation of brick clines is exempted
from this.
Kenya prohibits children under 16 from going to work in industries but
excludes agriculture. Bangladesh also specifies a minimum age to go to
work, but excludes agriculture and domestic work.
Indeed laws become unpractical and redundant in the face of necessity.
Poor children and their family members depend so much on little ones to
provide the basic necessities of life in the impoverished areas that it
becomes impossible for them to adhere to any laws and regulations
regarding child labor. We must also remember, that about one fifth of the
world’s six billion humans live in absolute poverty.
There are many loop holes in this law in terms of affectivity. First is that it
does not make child labor completely illegal and does not meet the
guidelines set by ILO concerning the minimum age for employment, which
is fifteen years. Moreover the policies which are set to reduce incidences of
child labor are difficult to implement and enforce. The government and
other agencies responsible for the enforcement of these laws are not doing
their job. Without proper enforcement all policies and laws concerning child
labor prove useless.
CHILD LABOUR POLICY IN INDIA
There are specific clauses in the draft of Indian constitution dated 26th
January 1950, about the child labor policy in India. These are conveyed
through different articles in the Fundamental rights and the Directive
Principles of the State Policy. They lay down four specific policy rules
regarding child labour.
The main legislative measures at the national level are The Child Labor
Prohibition and Regulation Act -1986 and The Factories Act -1948. The first
act was categorical in prohibiting the employment of children below
fourteen years of age, and identified 57 processes and 13 occupations
which were considered dangerous to the health and lives of children. The
details of these occupations and processes are listed in the schedule to the
said Act.
The factories act again prohibits the employment of children less than
fourteen years of age. However an adolescent aged between 15 and 18
can be recruited for factory employment only after securing a fitness
certificate from a medical doctor who is authorized. The Act proceeds to
prescribe only four and hour’s work period per day for children between 14
and 18 years. Children are also not allowed to work in night shifts.
Moreover, in the year 1996 the Supreme Court of India came out with a
judgment in court that directed the State and Union government to make a
list of all children embroiled in hazardous occupations and processes. They
were then told to pull them out of work and asked to provide them with
proper education of quality. The judiciary also laid down that Child Labor
and Welfare Fund is set up. The contribution for this was to be received
from employers who contravened the Child Labor Act.
India is also a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
ILO Abolition of Forced Convention – No 105 and ILO Forced labor
Convention – No. 29. A National Labor Policy was also adopted in the year
1987 in accordance with India’s development strategies and aims. The
National Policy was designed to reinforce the directive principles of state
policy in the Indian constitution.
SILK INDUSTRY & CHILD LABOUR
Hundreds and thousands of children are toiling as bonded labor in India’s silk industry
and the government is not able to do anything to protect their rights. Those children who
are working in India’s silk industry are virtually slaves.
Human rights organizations are calling on India to free these children from bonded labor
and rehabilitate them. The children are bound to work for their employers in exchange
of the loan taken by their parents or families, and are unable to leave because of the
debt. They are also paid very paltry sum for their labor. Most of these children are
Dalits. Dalits are called untouchables and belong to the lowest level in the hierarchy of
the Indian caste system.
Contrary to the Indian government’s claim bonded children are very conspicuous In
India everywhere. Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu form the core of India’s silk
and sari industry. Bonded children as young as five work for more them twelve hours a
day in the silk industry, at different levels of production. They toil for nearly seven days a
week, breathing smoky fumes from the silk making machinery. These children squat
near cramped looms to help and assist workers in dim and damp rooms. They are
required to dip their little hands in boiling hot water that causes blisters and handle dead
worms which breed infections. Twisting thread which injure their fingers is also a part of
the silk making process. Their attempts to attend school are met with protest and
physical violence by their employers. Their adulthood is impoverished, illiterate and
damaged by the weight of their childhood.
Children who work in silk factories are kept behind covers by being pushed into
individual homes. Tamil Nadu in South India is the home of the largest number of
bonded children. However more attention has been paid to rehabilitate children working
on match and fireworks manufacture, compared to silk factories.
Kanchipuram is the hub of silk sari weaving in Tamil Nadu, where child labor thrives
with a relish. Children are ill-treated, scolded, beaten and denied development needs
regularly for commercial gains in these industries. Silk fabric and silk threads are also
produced in some other states of India, where child labor flourishes. The plight of these
small silk workers epitomizes the sorry state of bonded children in the country.
Commercial exploitation and corrupt government machinery has violated all human
rights efforts to improve the lot of these children.
The southern state of Karnataka is a major silk producing state in India. It is the major
producer of Indian silk thread. The production depends completely on the labor of
bonded children under the age of fourteen. Most of the bonded children are either
Muslims or Dalits. Children as young as nine years are tied and beaten with belts if they
don’t do they work properly by the supervisors and owners in these industries.
CHILD LABOUR in INDIAN SWEET SHOPS
Indian sweet shops are notorious for profiting from child labor which is tantamount to
slavery. These shop also profit from illegal retail activities and use small and
vulnerable children in the manufacturing process. Children as young as eleven and
thirteen toil in these shops for hours on end and suffer from exertion and fatigue.
They have no fixed working hours and are constantly threatened with the fear of
being fired, are depressed and deprived of education and entertainment.
Indian sweet shops function quietly and illegally as household industries making little
children toil for long hours on very low wages before huge cauldrons of burning fat.
Many children working in Indian sweet shops remain unpaid or poorly paid, are
scolded, ill treated and underfed. Studies of children toiling in Indian sweet shops
show that they mainly hail from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Nepal. These children
sometimes also double up as domestic help for the owners of the sweet shops and
their families.
Most of the children working in this sector are not paid more than 300 to 800 rupees
in a month, for more than twelve hours of labor each day - in suffocating rooms
which are hot and smoky. The different processes of making Indian sweets also
tantamount to hard and relentless labor. A study shows that most of the children
working in Indian sweet shops want to quit work and go to school. They also pine to
stay with their parents and other family members. The owners of sweet shop
discourage their ambitions and shun the attempts of any social activists who try to
bring their plight in the lime light.
Sweet shop owners prefer to employ small children due to their vulnerability in terms
of wanting remuneration. Also, it is considerably easy to bully and scold a child.
They mostly employ minors, and are reluctant to divulge details about these little
employers and their working conditions. Besides the official statistics of 11 million
child workers in India, thousands working in these sweet shops go unreported,
because of the unorganized nature of their labor. The economic boom in India has
given a fillip to the profits of sweet shops, ironically worsening the lot of these
children. They are forced to work for longer hours at lesser wages to fulfill the
demand for the sweets, they help to make.
In a recent raid in Delhi, India’s political capital, many boy child workers were
rescued from several sweet shops. Agents had lured them from India’s poorest
regions with promises of good wages and decent working conditions. India’s poor
children are locked up in hidden floors of garment factories, match stick making
huts, carpet making work shops and sweltering sweet shop kitchens to create goods
for export. Some of their produce is sold in top shops in the UK and America for
huge profits, while they wither in dire poverty and abject deprivation.
Bonded CHILD LABOUR in INDIA
The most inhuman and onerous form of child exploitation is the age old practice of
bonded labor in India. In this, the child is sold to the loaner like a commodity for a
certain period of time. His labor is treated like security or collateral security and cunning
rich men procure them for small sums at exorbitant interest rates.
The children who are sold as bonded labor only get a handful of coarse grain to keep
them alive in return for their labor. Sometimes their period of thrall extends for a life
time, and they have to simply toil hard and depend on the mercy of their owners, without
any hope of release or redemption. The impoverished parents of the bonded child is
usually a poor, uneducated landless laborer and the mortgagee is traditionally some big
landlord, money lender or a big business man who thrives on their vulnerability to such
exploitation.
The practice of bonded child labor is prevalent in many parts of rural India, but is very
conspicuously in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu. Here the bonded child is allowed to
reside with his parents, if he presents himself for work at 8 a.m. every day. The practice
of child bonded labor persists like a scourge to humanity in spite of many laws against
it. These laws although stringent and providing for imprisonment and imposition of huge
fines on those who are found guilty are literally non- functional in terms of
implementation.
However most of their efforts were sabotaged by high level government officials
covering the fact that children were doing bonded work in factory promises. They
deliberately employed their energy in running public awareness campaigns and made
claims of creating propaganda against child labor, instead of punishing erring employers
and freeing and rehabilitating the bonded children.
Governments did take few directions on the right track initially, but most of their efforts
came to naught with time. Moreover the government efforts did not reach high profile
industries like bidi, cigarette making and carpet weaving. According to Cousen Neff - an
official of the Human Rights watch – “Instead of living up to its promises, the Indian
government is starting to backtrack, claiming the problem is being solved. Our research
shows that it is not.”
Neff also identified a major link between caste and bondage in Indian society. Dalit family’s
functions as bonded labor due to caste based discrimination and violence and not poverty in
many cases. The caste system in India is one of the main foundations on which the edifice of
bonded labor rests. Dalits or the so called untouchable are denied access to land in India,
forced to work in inhuman conditions, and expected to perform labor for free. This is due to the
so called upper castes boycotting them socially and subjecting them to economic exploitation.
This attitude of society keeps the poor families bonded in a scourge of perpetual poverty and
labor. It is now very important for all International donors to put pressure on the Indian
government to enforce bonded labor and child labor laws in the country.
CHILD LABOUR THE REAL SITUATION
The term ‘child labor’ means ‘working child’ or ‘employed child’. ‘Child labor’
is any work done by child for profit. ‘Child labor’ is a derogatory term which
translates into child exploitation and inhumanity according to sociologists,
development workers, medical professionals and educationists. They have
identified child labor as harmful and hazardous to the child’s development
needs, both mental and physical.
SHRI V.V. Giri – the former president of India has arrived on two concepts
of child labor – first as a bad economic practice and second as an overt
social evil. In the first it is involvement of a child labor in profitable activities
to augment the family income. The second context, namely child labor a
social evil – is more complex in nature and extent. In order to assess the
nature of the evil, and gauge the extent of damage it becomes necessary to
understand the character of the job in which the child is engaged, the
dangers to which they are exposed and the development opportunities they
are denied.
Technically the term ‘child labour’ is used for children occupied in profitable
activities, whether industrial or non industrial. It is especially applicable for
activities which are detrimental to their physical, psychological, emotional,
social and moral development needs. It has been researched and proved
that the brain of a child develops till the age of ten, muscles till the age of
seventeen and his lungs till the age of fourteen. To be more specific, any
activity which acts as a hazard for the natural growth and enhancement of
these vital organs can be considered harmful for natural human growth and
development and termed – ‘child labor’.
It has been observed in India and other countries, that the practice of ‘child
labor’ is a socio- economic problem. Many appalling realities like poverty,
illiteracy, unemployment, low wages, ignorance, social prejudices,
regressive traditions, poor standard of living, backwardness, superstition,
low status of women have combined to give birth to the terrible practice of
child labor. Mr. Madan, Deputy Director in the Ministry of labor has been
quoted as saying that “the children are required to seek employment either
to augment the income of their families or to have a gainful occupation in
the absence of availability of school going facilities at various places.
STOP CHILD LABOUR
The future of a community is in the well being of its children. The above fact
is beautifully expressed by Wordsworth in his famous lines “child is father
of the man”. So it becomes imperative for the health of a nation to protect
its children from premature labor which is hazardous to their mental,
physical, educational and spiritual development needs. It is urgently
required to save children from the murderous clutches of social injustice
and educational deprivation, and ensure that they are given opportunities
for healthy, normal and happy growth.
