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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Stolen generation -Rekha Dixit

Stolen generation -Rekha Dixit

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published Published on Oct 22, 2014   modified Modified on Oct 22, 2014
-The Week

Shambhu Kumar, 8, quite liked his job as a domestic help in a small town in Assam. He had to mind two children nearly his age, keep an eye on the ducks and be available for chores all day. It wasn't too hard, and he was well fed, too, though he missed his grandmother, a tea garden labourer.

One day, some women from the state education department came to the house to check whether there were any out-of-school children in the family. They spotted Shambhu and told his employer to immediately enrol him in the primary school nearby-the Right to Education (RTE) Act had come into force and they would get into trouble with the law otherwise. So Shambhu began schooling, and the family adjusted his duties to ensure regular attendance and homework time.

This went on for two years, till his studies got more intense and he got homesick. Whether Shambhu's lot improved in the impoverished home of his granny or whether he was sent to another home as help we do not know. What we do know is that his erstwhile employers decided to hire an adult help when he left. The advantages of cheap child labour were far outweighed by the constant fear of being under the eye of the social welfare department.

It is only when the social and economic cost of hiring child labour becomes unaffordable will this shameful human rights violation get wiped off the country. Not every employer, however, gets under scrutiny, or not every official sincerely executes her duty. Thus, child labour remains rampant, despite well-meaning laws and intentions.

"The demand for child labour today is governed purely by economic concerns,'' says Shireen Vakil Miller, advocacy head of the non-government organisation Save the Children. "All that talk about their nimbler fingers being better at tying carpet knots or pressing bricks is nonsense. People hire children because they are cheap, they don't even have to be paid minimum wages. They are the most vulnerable to exploitation."

India today considers itself an economic powerhouse, no longer needy of foreign aid. "In such an environment, how can the country explain its child labour population? Today we even have schemes like the rural employment guarantee to ensure minimum wages for every family. We have laws like the RTE to ensure children remain in schools. There is no reason for them to be toiling, even on a part time basis," says Miller.

The campaign against child labour has been a long one in India, heading back to the 1970s. This year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi has been crusading since the mid 1990s, his initial work being in the Mirzapur Bhadohi belt of carpet weavers. According to a rough estimate, during its hey day, there were around three lakh child labourers working in the 50,000 small and major units in the area. Satyarthi's campaign was two-pronged. On the one hand, he organised raids to free the child workers, often in the media gaze. On the other, he campaigned for the Rugmark logo, which certified that a carpet had not exploited child labour in its manufacturing.

Nobody wants to jack up production cost-neither the manufacturer nor the exporter. So there was no will to dispense with child labour. The smart way to deal with the issue, therefore, was consumer awareness. When the buyer regards a product as testimony of some child's stolen childhood and shuns it, the supply chain has to get its act clean down the line.

Manufacturers of the famed brassware of Moradabad, too, faced a similar situation when their export consignments began getting rejected because of the taint of child labour. Add to that the constant vigil from activists and sometimes even the government, and hiring children actually became an impediment. Today, every factory in the famous Pital Nagri area carries a sign on its outside walls claiming that anyone under 18 is prohibited entry to the premises.

Nutan Bhatnagar is headmistress of the Parivartan School here, which was set up by a trust to provide free education to children. "When we opened in 2002, many of our students were erstwhile brass workers. Then we went through a phase when we had several students who went back to work after school. This year's batch hardly has a child who has had work experience,'' she says. In fact, the only child in a class of 50 who shot up his hand to say he had worked before being enrolled was employed with a halwai (sweetmeat maker).

Is India finally closing in towards that utopian ideal where every child is entitled a carefree childhood? Not really. For it is common knowledge that while the organised sector might have become wary, the unorganised sector thrives on almost indentured child labour. Indeed, just a few kilometres away from the organised industrial area in Moradabad, we encountered little Amaan and Aslam working in a small unit that smelts brass filings and then moulds them into new products. As the boys poured tumblers of molten metal into the moulds, with neither gloves nor masks, we had proof, if any was required, of just how vulnerable children remain to exploitation in India, despite the global gaze on this shameful aspect of our sweatshop production units.

Rajnath, who runs a social organisation called Bal Kalyan Evam Shodh Sansthan in the carpet belt, says that because of "constant monitoring and international pressure the number of child labourers might have declined, even the trafficking of children from Nepal and Bihar has come down. But the area is not 100 per cent free from child labour; such employment has only gone underground."

There is a dismal absence of accurate data on the extent of child labour in India. Census 2011 put it at 4.3 million; Unicef's figure for the same period was 28 million, while the International Labour Organisation came up with 40 million. "The government's figures claim that there are around seven million children out of school," says Miller. "Since almost all of them must be working somewhere, how can its child labour figures be 4.3 million?''

Excuses employers come up with for hiring children get creative in every industry. During the industrial revolution children were made to sweep chimneys or enter narrow mines in Europe, all for a wage of scarcely anything. Their modern-day equivalents are abundant in India. Carpet makers insist children's nimble fingers tie the best knots, bidi manufactures feel they are the best for rolling tobacco filled leaves. In Andhra Pradesh, brick kiln owners say they are best for flipping semi-baked bricks and prefer hiring families that have children. If a couple does not have a child, they tell them to hire a child to work in the kiln, says Umi Daniel of Aide et Action, an international development agency. In Gujarat's BT cotton seed farms, they say children are best at performing manual cross pollination. What employers do not like mentioning is that a child can be made to work for 12 hours at one-sixth the wages an adult demands.

Gujarat's BT cotton seed farms attract migrant labour in thousands, of which 70 per cent are children. Ramesh Srivastava, legal coordinator of Prayas Centre for Labour Research and Action, says most children are sent by their parents, who are told by contractors that the children would be given good education. Once at the farms, the children end up in 12-hour shifts of back-breaking work. They remain vulnerable every way possible, from rape to neglect. In 2012, Anil Baghora, 13, lost an arm in a ginning mill. Just a few days before the accident, a state government team had inspected the premises, acting upon a complaint. The team did not find a single working child; the employers had forced them to huddle up and sleep.

Forget minimum wages, children neither get nor expect medical compensation when accidents occur. Take, for instance, the case of Shanthi, who, along with her sister, was sent to a spinning mill in Coimbatore under the Sumangali Thittam scheme, which assured them Rs30,000 each at the end of three years besides the monthly salary. Their job was to feed cotton into the spinner which would make the yarn. As the machines were huge, they were provided with roller-skates for quick movement. One day, Shanthi lost her hand in an accident in the mill. She was given basic treatment and sent home. Her employers said her dues were adjusted with the medical treatment. Only after a long struggle and with the intervention of the Tamil Nadu State Commission for Women did she get some compensation.

The Child Labour Act has a list of occupations in which children should not be employed. Activists say the list is not comprehensive and its implementation is abysmal. Meanwhile, new hazardous occupations are emerging in developing India. If rag picking was bad enough, e-waste has added a whole new dimension to the hazards involved. A recent study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India says more than 4.5 lakh children were involved in the collection and segregation of e-waste without proper protection.

Satyarthi's Nobel has put the spotlight on a shameful problem in India which is nowhere near an early resolution. In 2012, the child labour amendment bill was tabled in the Rajya Sabha. It sought a complete ban on employment till the age of 14, to get in line with the RTE. It suggested a new category called 'adolescent', between 14 and 18, and sought a ban on employing adolescents in hazardous units as defined by the act. It also suggested more severe penalty for employing children in hazardous units.

The amendments are inadequate, activists say, and the need is for a call to ban all forms of child labour till 18, by removing the distinction between hazardous and non-hazardous categories of work. Pravin Desali of Apeksha, an organisation working against child labour in Maharashtra's Amravati region, recounts rescuing eight children from a hotel, supposedly a non-hazardous workplace. "They were made to stand in water and wash dishes for eight hours at a stretch," he says.

While activists hope the bill will be cleared in the winter session of Parliament, everyone is painfully aware of the reality that children are not a vote bank. Long-pending laws for safety of women were amended in a trice when there was a national shame and uprising following the rape of a woman in a bus in Delhi in December 2012. Is India waiting for another such scare to wake up to the problem of child labour? And will a set of improved laws actually hand over the promised childhood to these young people?

"What we need is a mass movement on the lines of Swachch Bharat, where the government ropes in stakeholders, celebrities, everyone, and aims for a zero tolerance to child labour,'' says Miller. "There is a scheme for having a model village in each parliamentarian's constituency. One parameter for being a model village should be its child friendliness-whether it has an anganwadi, health centre and is child labour free."

WITH AJAY UPRETY, LALITA IYER, NANDINI OZA, NIRANJAN TAKLE, LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN AND PRATHIMA NANDAKUMAR

Names of some children have been changed to protect their identity.

Bag of bother

BY PRATHIMA NANDAKUMAR

Bag manufacturing units in Bengaluru are thriving. Schoolbags, laptop satchels, lunch bags-you name it, and they have it. Even well-known brands source their products from these units.

There is, however, a dark side to the booming industry. In April, 64 child workers, including 11 from Nepal, were rescued from five units in the DJ Halli area. Aged between nine and 18 years, the children were working 15 hours a day, stitching bags and paraphernalia for their privileged peers.

The children in the bag manufacturing units work, eat and sleep in shabby, overcrowded rooms. "They are lured by middleman, usually a relative who promises their parents good income, but ends up sending a paltry sum to them while the children toil on," says activist Gunasheela.

The demand for cheap labour has made Bengaluru a hub of child labourers. State-run rehabilitation centres are overflowing with rescued children who have no information about their families. According to Nagasimha Rao, nodal supervisor of Childline in Bengaluru, nearly 30 children are rescued every day from railway stations alone.

Infernal lives

BY LALITA IYER

India is the second largest brick producer in the world after China, producing 14 billion bricks a year. According to a study by the NGO Aide et Action in western Odisha, 41 per cent of kiln workers are between six and 14 years of age.

Most brick kilns in India are on the outskirts of cities, away from the glare of law enforcement agencies. While child labourers are employed in almost every stage of brick-making, from mixing clay to firing dried bricks, they are particularly sought after to walk over vast stretches of semi-dried bricks, flipping each brick twice a day. Since brick-making is done between November and June, child labourers have to walk light-footed on rows of bricks under the hot sun, ensuring that they do not damage the bricks.

The children end up ingesting and inhaling a deadly mix of chemicals and raw materials-the most common being fly ash.

Brick-makers are largely migrants, says Umi Daniel of Aide et Action, and the brick-making season ensures that child labourers never see school.

Choking on cotton

BY NIRANJAN TAKLE

Two years ago, Pravin Desali of Apeksha, an NGO working to abolish child labour in Maharashtra, rescued six child labourers from a ginning mill in Amravati. The children, all of them tribals from Melghat, were between nine to 13 years of age.

They were anaemic and suffering from chronic cough-the after-effect of working in a ginning mill for years. "Fine strands of cotton, inhaled every day, had filled their little lungs, leading to chronic cough," said Desali.

Thanks to him, the children have now been rehabilitated. But ginning mills across the country continue to employ child labourers.

Little hands, big burden

Where do child labourers work? According to the Union labour ministry, major industries employing them are tobacco (21 per cent), construction (17 per cent) and textiles (11 per cent). About 15 per cent of child labourers are domestic workers.

Since agriculture is not organised, the number of child workers in the sector is not accounted for. In 2004-05, however, the National Sample Survey estimated that there were around 5.6 million children working in agriculture, of whom 2.75 million were female. Children working in the agriculture sector constitute two-third of all child labourers in India.

The garment industry has a sizeable population of child labourers, though their actual numbers are not documented. A survey done by the Ethical Trading Initiative in 2002 estimated that the garment industry in Tirupur had 8,000 to 35,000 child workers. Human Rights Watch reports that at least 60,000 children are involved in silk production in Karnataka.

According to a survey conducted in Lucknow, 18.9 per cent of workers in the zardosi industry are children. The National Family Health Survey (2005-2006) said around 12 per cent children in the age group of five to 14 years worked either for their household or somebody else's.

LABOUR PAIN

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) says that, according to 2011 census data, there are 82.2 lakh child labourers aged five to 14. Counting children up to age 18, the figure is 3.5 crore. Civil society organisations, however, say the figure is more than five crore.

* According to the ministry of statistics, nearly 85 per cent of child labourers in India are hard to reach as they work in the unorganised sector or within families.

* Global March Against Child Labour, the organisation headed by Nobel Prize-winner Kailash Satyarthi, says rates of prosecution and conviction in cases of child labour are 10 per cent and 1 per cent, respectively.

* According to a 2012 report by the ministry of statistics, 16.6 per cent children from Scheduled Tribe households work, while in the case of Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Class households, it is 11.6 per cent and 12.2 per cent, respectively.

* Provisions in the Constitution, including Article 24, Article 23, Article 21(A) and Article 45, safeguard children from labour and provide for access to education.

* The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, prohibits child labour in hazardous conditions, but does not have a rehabilitative framework.


Bangladesh: The National Child Labour Survey 2003 said 38 lakh children were working; 13 lakh in hazardous conditions. The manufacturing sector employed 27.6 per cent, agriculture 20.9 per cent and trade 19.4 per cent.

Pakistan: The 1996 Child Labour Survey said there are 33 lakh child labourers, with 71 per cent in the unskilled sectors.

Sri Lanka: A 2008-09 survey by the Department of Census reported 1.07 lakh child labourers, with 66.3 per cent working as domestic helpers and agricultural and construction workers.

Nepal: A 2011 report by Nepal's Central Bureau of Statistics reported 16 lakh child labourers. Majority work in the agricultural sector, followed by services and manufacturing.

Outlook, 20 October, 2014, http://week.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/mmonline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?contentId=17792755&programId=1073755753&tabId=13&categoryId=-221101


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