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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

One less mouth to feed by Shyamal Majumdar
A fortnight ago, Moin was beaten to death by his uncle who was the owner of the factory where the 10-year-old worked. Very few would have cared but for television, which brought the horrific images of his battered body into middle-class living rooms. But it’s doubtful if anybody would remember Moin’s tragedy once the TV cameras shift elsewhere.

This has happened many times. Just a year ago, an engineer couple was arrested in Bangalore for torturing a 14-year-old domestic help. The girl told the police that she was asked to remove her clothes while at work. When she protested, she was beaten black and blue. The couple got bail after a few days, and now that the media has moved to more sensational cases, no one cares about how that case finally panned out.

Since International Workers’ Day is just two days away, it’s time to look at the grim statistics on child labour in India. According to Bachpan Bachao Andolan, 12.6 million children continue to work in hazardous factories across the country and around five children go missing from Delhi’s streets every day. These children are trafficked by inter-state gangs as bonded labourers.

Others are still mopping floors in residences, sweating in the heat of stone quarries, working in the fields 16 hours a day, picking rags in city streets, or serving at roadside eateries. Worse, their presence in hazardous occupations only seems to grow bigger and bigger. Are they any luckier than Moin?

Take the beedi industry. Despite countless laws against child labour, the average number of beedis a child labourer rolls in a day is 1,500, for an average daily wage of Rs 9. The working conditions are dangerous to the child’s health. The long hours spent hunched over the basket of tobacco causes growth deformities, and the constant proximity to tobacco dust causes and exacerbates lung diseases; there is a high rate of tuberculosis in communities dedicated to the manufacture of beedis.

A Human Rights Watch study has shown how every industry thoroughly violates the protective regulations of the Child Labour Act. The violated provisions include the right to an hour of rest after three hours of work; a maximum work day of six hours; prohibition of child work before 8 a m or after 7 p m; a mandatory day of rest every week; and the requirement that various health and safety precautions be observed.

In a research note, CRY (Child Rights and You) CEO Pooja Marwah says in the 7,000-odd villages and slums in which the organisation works, there is evidence of child labour being intrinsically linked to the lack of free, quality government schools near home. No buildings, no teachers, irregular teaching, and no separate toilets for girls — these are some key realities that push children out of school and into work.

Though the last few decades have seen significant progress in improving the enrolment of children in schools (the gross enrolment ratio or GER from Class I to VIII was 94.9 per cent and from Class I to XII, 77 per cent), Marwah says hiding behind the GER is the sheer number of children who do not attend, or those who drop out. Government schools lose a quarter of their students by Grade V, and almost half by Grade VIII.

Many children can’t go to school simply because there isn’t one to go to in their neighbourhood. As many as 17,282 eligible habitations in India do not have a primary school within one km of the habitation, Marwah adds.

CRY also shows how children’s health is a forgotten priority in India. This comes up very clearly when we see the infant mortality rate at 50 child deaths per 1,000 live births, against the government’s target of bringing the numbers down to 28 child deaths per 1,000 births by 2012.

A more telling indicator is India’s approach to healthcare in general with 42 per cent of the world’s undernourished children within its borders, the government still spends only 1.27 per cent of its GDP on health for the entire population.

India has not fallen behind in framing legislations, the latest being ban on child labour in homes. That the legislation can have only a negligible impact is apparent from the fact that child labour is nothing but a by-product of grinding poverty, experts say.

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. In any case, the working child is a mouth less for families in penury to feed.