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Monday, 6 May, 2002, 15:00 GMT 16:00 UK
India 'losing' child-labour battle
![]() Poverty is blamed for many being sent out to work
A decade after India ratified a UN convention pledging to protect children's rights, the country continues to be home to the world's largest number of child labourers. Estimates vary widely, but it is believed there are up to 100 million children toiling in homes, factories, shops, fields, brothels and on the streets of rural and urban India.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated that 40% of India's citizens were living in abject poverty in the mid-1990s and most believe that figure has not fallen. Research suggests that since families need money to survive, children are pushed into work at an early age to supplement the meagre income. Sociologists say the lower castes of Hindu society perhaps feel this pressure the most.
But many aid agencies tend to be critical of what they consider the government's over-emphasis on the link between poverty and child labour. They say it is a telling example of the lack of political will to implement a plethora of laws that are already in place to prevent and regulate the employment of children. India is a signatory to more than 120 ILO conventions, all of which seek to eliminate child labour. Legal loopholes It also has national legislation that prohibits "children's employment in jobs hazardous to their lives and health". The laws also assure "regulation of working conditions of children employed in occupations and processes where their employment is not prohibited". But according to a leading non-governmental organisation called Campaign Against Child Labour, the legislation suffers from too many loopholes. In a report submitted to a session of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1999, the group said the legislation's distinction between hazardous and non-hazardous occupations was arbitrary. Many jobs that were dangerous for untrained children were left out, including glass-manufacturing, sari-weaving, rag-picking, sewer-cleaning and gem-polishing.
These kind of jobs may include working in the fields as unskilled labour, as care-givers to younger siblings in their own homes, as domestic help in other people's homes and as part of the country's larger sector of the self-employed. But above all, the law is seen to suffer from a poor record of implementation. Between 1986 and 1993, nearly 4,000 people were reported to have been charged for violating labour law but only a few more than 1,000 were convicted and none served a jail sentence. Education example Activists say what is far more important than laws banning child labour, is a political commitment to primary education. India's southern state of Kerala which boasts a near-100% literacy rate is cited as a prime example. Only one in 100 of the state's children are recorded to be working, compared with a national average of nearly eight in 100.
The state has not made any special effort to end child labour, but the expansiveness of the school system is seen to have had a crucial effect in keeping children inside the classroom rather than at work. More than 350 million of India's over one billion population are estimated to be illiterate. Investment crucial And although a bill that makes access to free, primary education a fundamental right has been passed recently by the Indian parliament's lower house, constitutional experts say it is not yet clear how the government intends to make this happen. Some educational experts say it will require the investment of nearly 600 billion rupees ($12bn) over the next decade or so - a cost that the government may be unwilling to bear on its own. But advocacy groups say the pressure is steadily mounting on India to improve its dismal record of child rights. Apart from some funding being made indirectly conditional on individual countries' child-right records, India also faces the threat posed by continuing debates at World Trade Organisation (WTO) forums with developed countries keen on linking trade to labour standards. They say the solution lies in the government working closely with aid agencies in the field - to help combat child labour with literacy programmes and give the voluntary sector more teeth in implementing them effectively. |
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