Appeal for Total Abolition of Child Labour
• There are 100 million children who do not go to school in our country today.
• India has the largest number of child labour in the world and the number is growing day by day.
• More than 40% of school going children do not complete class five.
• Only ten children out of one hundred who join in class one reach up to class ten
• India ranks 127 in the HDR of UNDP list of 150 countries. This puts us below several sub Saharan countries
• India spends only 3.2 % of its GDP on education whereas 6% of GDP is the globally accepted standard. This is indeed an alarming situation!
Appeal for Total Abolition of Child Labour
This is an appeal to get involved in the campaign for a total abolition of child labour in the country to make education a reality for every child. It is a call on behalf of the millions of children who are condemned to lives of drudgery, exploitation and untold misery. Children who are working relentlessly day in and day out instead of being in schools, with friends, at play discovering the joys of growing up and marveling at earth’s bounty and the cosmic harmony. They need the support of each one of us to get out of work and child labour. They need you to believe that children must not work and must be in schools.
Child labour exists because we think children must work
Even if just one of us begins to think and argue that children have to work because they are poor, or have to earn an income to keep the family going or else it would collapse, it would weaken the resolve to extricate children from work places. The truth is that children are working not because they are poor. They are working because in our country we are neither shocked nor outraged that children do not go to schools. They are working because we think it is normal and find it acceptable that poor children must work for survival. The reason for child labour is primarily the absence of a social norm in favor of children and their right to education.
One may ask the question ‘how would our thinking have any influence at all on the lives of children’. Simply put, many forms of oppression in the society get accepted because we think it is inevitable. In case of child labour it allows for children to become available in the labor market, for all those who want cheap labor can seek child labor because it is not considered wrong to employ them. Conveniently, children are engaged in work, as they are a source of labor that will be docile, hidden, and invisible and work unquestioningly. They are available as domestic servants in our own middle class homes precisely because we think that it is an economic necessity for the poor families. We even believe that if we did not take ‘care’ of these children, giving them food and shelter, allowing them to watch TV, play with our children and their toys, their condition would be far worse.
Say ‘NO’ to child labour and Children will be in schools
Indeed none of these children have to work. We have seen from our experience that once we have been able to mobilise support for the cause of children’s education and galvanized the energies of all, poor parents gained the confidence to withdraw their children from work. They have made enormous sacrifices to send their children to schools. Young ten to twelve year olds were released from bonded labour defying local authorities and power structures. Girls, whose everyday life had the monotony of getting water fetch-by-fetch, collecting fuel wood, doing domestic chores and farm work also sought education. Most of these children got out of exploitative situations.
We also saw what the impact has been on the villages once child labour is totally abolished in that area. Adults have replaced children in the labour market and since they would not work for cheap, they are now getting better wages and have better conditions of work. Fathers are drinking much less and are working harder because they have to invest in their children’s education. Further, parents have become parents, with a lot of pride in the fact that their children are no longer in work but are students. The quality of life in the family has vastly improved and there has been a break in the intergenerational cycle of poverty and deprivation. Schools have become schools, teachers have become teachers and processes of resolving conflicts without resorting to violence, caste and community hatred have emerged.
Thus with a change in the social milieu where everyone speaks in one voice that children must not work and must all be in schools, with everyone participating in caring for the child there is a protection of child rights and strengthening of democracy. Support poor parents and their battle for schools
I also think that we have failed to recognize the yearning of the poor for their children and their education and in fact deliberately ignored this aspect. We have seen how hundreds of thousands of parents are entering into debts because they want their children to get the best of education. They are sending them to the English medium private schools and are willing to do all that they can to give them the best of education. For those who are not able to afford, we find how they are sending their children to overcrowded schools; to schools that lack teachers; to schools without water or toilets; to schools that do not respect their children; to schools that subject them to corporal punishment as if it were an indispensable pedagogic tool. Even as it is incessantly argued that the poor cannot and will not send their children to schools, they send them in a hope that one-day the school system would learn to respect them and their children.
Being stubborn and determined to study, many poor children prefer to endure the insults of the system as they see the struggle to be in schools as a struggle for their dignity, self respect and discover their strengths. In fact, if the education system is surviving even at the level it is in the country today, it is because of the poor and their battle for schools. All those children who survived in a government school and made it up to class ten have paved the way for future generation of children in the country.
Join campaign for Amendment to the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986
If we are to release millions of children from the labour force today in the country and prevent millions of them from joining the labor force, we need to support the cause for children’s education as a matter of right. There cannot be a negotiation on this. The 86th amendment to the Constitution has made right to education a fundamental right. We have to create a social environment that compels the State to provide all facilities to translate their promises into action. We must also press for an amendment to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, which is very flawed. The Act is limited in its content since it abolishes child labour in certain so-called ‘hazardous’ industries alone. In fact children may work in the hazardous industry if it is contribution for a family enterprise. When carpet industries were subject to global scrutiny many looms were shifted form the factories to the homes of the poor as family enterprises!
In effect, the Act condones and allows the existence of millions of children who are subject to the hazards of not being in school, and indeed working in extremely exploitative conditions. How can a child realize his fundamental right to education, if s/he is simultaneously asked to be made responsible for earning a living?
The Bill on “Free and Compulsory Education’ would make sense only when correspondingly there is an amendment to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986. They must to include clauses for abolition of child labour in all its forms in the country, thereby relieving all children from their lives of drudgery so that they can go to school.
Surely as we move towards a global economy and becoming an economic super-power, our children deserve this much. We need to be able to guarantee all our children an equal opportunity to participate in the economic growth of the nation, which only equal and compulsory access to education can ensure.
We need your support to the cause of total abolition of child labour in all its forms and for children’s right to education only through full time formal day school. This will go a long way in liberating the children and consequently liberating the country as a whole.
About the author: Dr.Sinha is the Secretary Trustee of MV Foundation, a non-profit organization working towards the total eradication of child labour. She is also a Professor in the department of Political Sciences at the Hyderabad Central University. Dr.Sinha has, in the past, been honored with such awards as the Padmashri, The Ramon Magsaysay award, The Albert Shanker International Award. PaGaLGuY.com thanks Dr.Sinha for having taken the time out to write this article for our portal. To learn more about Dr.Sinha’s work, and the campaign to amend the child labour act, log onto MVF-India