November 14 is Children’s Day, but for 23 million children in the country it will be yet another day of hard labour. Is the law simply making India’s child labourers invisible? CNN-IBN finds out in a special series Child, Interrupted!
CNN-IBN brings in an elite panel of experts on child labour laws to analyse human rights violations in India.
By Swami Agnivesh
All forms of child labour stood banned the day we adopted our Constitution. The Constitution guarantees education for all children up to the age of 14. This should leave no room for exploitation of a child as a labour.
The Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act, 1986, bans child labour in what it defines as hazardous industries. This is a flexible list that the Government keeps revising from time to time.
The 1986 Act while prohibiting bonded child labour from hazardous industries also allows it to thrive in some other form. A child working in a factory is considered hazardous and is not allowed. But if the child is part of the family labour, he’s allowed to work. Hence, the 1986 Act has a large scope of exploitation of children if they could be brought under the family-child labour phenomena.
We social activists from day one have been crying hoarse about this act and we still have a feeling it was more about legitimising child labour rather than prohibiting it.
At that time domestic child labour and hotel/dhabas were not under hazardous category. It is only now that the Government woke up and decided to add these two categories. This is nothing radical, nothing new.
All this is a futile exercise under the old discredited act of 1986, which we have been accusing of legitimising child labour in our country rather than prohibiting it. We are skeptic about the intention of the Government. If they really mean business, they must ban all forms of child labour. For them to say that this is hazardous and this is non-hazardous is not done.
We feel that any form of work, any type of labour by a child which puts into danger his or her growth as a child, denial of education, denial of all other facilities and opportunities is hazardous for the growth of the child and therefore it should be banned completely.
The Government lacks political will to take a stand on this issue. If their intention was to ban child labour, they should understand that no child in the world would like to work for eight-16 hours in a day and not go to school and not play like a child.
So, if a child is working even for six-eight hours, there is definitely an element of force and coercion. We have to take it for granted that there is an element of force and the child is not simply a child labour but a forced child labour and therefore bonded child labour.
You can easily guess that if children are not in school and they belong to the school going age say up to the age of 14, then obviously they’re all being exploited in somebody’s home or somebody’s dhaba/factory/farm. It can’t be that children not in school are picnicking somewhere! They’re all being exploited. So, the most important thing for the Government to do is to provide equal opportunities of education to all children irrespective of their economic status, caste, creed, religion or gender.
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That has been the biggest, most important mandate of our Constitution – in terms of growth and economic development. It is the most important thing to start with.
Any developing country cannot afford to neglect education for all its children. You have to provide for the resources and infrastructure and then only you can think of economic development of a country as a whole. Otherwise you are catering only for the rich, for the haves and the upper castes. The governments since our independence have abdicated completely in a criminal way their major responsibility to provide good quality, equal opportunities in terms of education to the children of the nation.
No amount of policy, court directions or punishment is going to work. The simple and the best thing, which works automatically, is to provide good quality education to all the children on the basis of equity and justice.
In order to do that, the Government should take a call. The Prime Minister should initiate this and say the whole country should pool their moral and material resources because children are our biggest wealth. They’re the future. Not just future, they’re the today.
If all children will be in school, the vicious cycle of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and population explosion will be broken. All these are interlinked. If you have millions of children who are of school-going age but are not in school and are being exploited as child labour, it also means that we have an equal number of adults who are unemployed.
These children will grow up as illiterates and unskilled labours. They will not be able to get good wages and in order to feed their own family, they will send their own children to work somewhere. So it’s a vicious cycle.
The Central Government should take upon itself the task of imparting good quality education to all the nation’s children and then ask states to participate, religions to participate, civil society, business, commerce industry and everybody to participate. The media should also be geared to create a campaign around it. Everybody should join this nation-building exercise and the topmost priority should be given to education.
Children are being paid a pittance and they’re as young as eight-10-12 years. They’re forced to work for long hours – 12-14 hours a day, crammed in small rooms. You can hardly move there. They have to sleep in those rooms and no facilities of sanitation, toilets are available. It is in awful, appalling, inhuman conditions. All this is happening very close to police stations.
Everybody knows what’s happening, we don’t have to go and tell the authorities. They know about it. Child labour can be stamped out and guilty can be punished, if the district officers, the collector, the magistrate and the labour officer are made responsible. They must give an undertaking that they will make sure that there’s not a single child being exploited in any way in their areas. If they fail in their responsibility, they should lose their job.
The citizens have tremendous power. The civil society has to gear up and say that no we will not put up with it. If in your own house you are exploiting a child, stop that. If in your neighbourhood somebody else is exploiting a child, raise your voice. Bring that to the notice of the authorities. If the authorities are not acting then you do something about it. You are so agitated about your illegal buildings and shops, and you can protest against the Supreme Court, why can’t you protest about this abominable practice of child labour?
The civil society has tremendous power but they think everything should be done by the Government. Government means bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has no accountability. Even if every law is being violated in their area, the job of the deputy collector or the commissioner is secure. No officer has even been suspended for a day for the gross violations taking place in his or her jurisdiction. Why? Each of these laws must have a provision. It should clearly state who would be responsible for the implementation? There’s no accountability whatsoever.
The biggest culprits are our bureaucrats and nobody is raising a finger. If tomorrow you make them responsible for the implementation of the act, you will see a sea change…a drastic change.
Swami Agnivesh is a women and child rights activist. He is the chairperson of the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (Bonded Labour Liberation Front) and a member of the International Peace Council.
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