Child labour in India, the beginning of the end?

News

Child rights activists in India have called on the country’s parliament to quickly ratify a Cabinet decision to ban child labour and introduce fines and prison terms for violations of the law.

The government’s move will ban all employment of children up to the minimum school-leaving age of 14, and all hazardous work for under-18s.

“This Cabinet decision is a remarkable victory after years and years of struggle. We need to see the parliament adopt it in its current session, so millions of children affected can finally get out of work and into school,” said Kailash Satyarthi, Chair of the Global March Against Child Labour.

The Global March, which originated in India, is an international coalition of NGOs and trade unions formed in 1998.

While widespread use of child labour in production of textiles, gemstones, cotton seed and other export industries has brought India under the international spotlight, most of the more than 12 million working children between 5 and 14 years old are in industries producing for national markets.

Domestic service, agriculture, production of beedi cigars are amongst the sectors where most of the country’s huge child labour force works.

Up to one third of workers making hand-embroidered sari textiles for sale at home and abroad are children, many of them come from the categories of dalits, the minorities, and are girls as young as 6 saving for their marriage dowry.

Unlike some other neighbouring countries, India hasn’t ratified yet the core conventions on child labour adopted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), that set the age at which children can legally be employed and that aim to prevent any hazardous form of work and any kind of abuse.

So far the various national and state laws to eliminate or regulate the employment of children in India have failed to stem the flow of children into work, mostly from poor families belonging to the lowest rungs of the caste ladder.

Only about 900,000 children have been rescued from work since 1988, through the National Child Labour project. The scheme is still going on in 20 States and is expected to rehabilitate child labourers through education, vocational training and health care.

The new national law is seen by Sathyarthi and fellow activists as finally opening the way for a wholesale national drive to end the practice.

But, they claim, legal measures alone will not do the job.

“We will only succeed when the right to education, a legal right for all India’s children, is fully enforced and the education system is properly funded. The problem needs to be tackled from both ends, and the linkage of the new child labour law with the law on education is the right way to go,” said Satyarthi.

Groups such as the MV Foundation, which began in 1991, have long recognised that child labour will be a fact of life when there is no place in school for a child.

The Foundation combines its own provision of education with political campaigns to tackle child exploitation and extend government-funded education.