The five-hour drive from Coimbatore to Munnar through the picturesque ghats could have been a visual treat but for the brief meeting with Mithailal Tikri at a tea shop, just half an hour into the journey.

Ten-year-old Mithai is mopping the floors at the shop and runs to take the order as the owner barks at him. His torn trousers and dirty shirt are perhaps good enough reasons why the tea shop is empty even though the tourist season is just about peaking. After all, health-conscious tourists would barely like to be served tea by "unhygienic" child labour.

Mithai says his father, who worked as a labourer in a towel factory in Coimbatore, died two years ago. His mother works as a cook in a nearby dhaba, and Mithai doesn't mind the frequent twisting of his ears by the owner of the tea shop because of the free meals and Rs 10-a-day salary. The bonus: he is allowed to go to his mother after 8 pm.

Even as he serves us tea, the little labourer requests us not to mention all this when we meet the owner for settling the bill. Thus, Mithai is a slight variation of his original name.

Mithai is just an example of how the stigma of child labour persists in India even one-and-a-half years after the government banned the hiring of children as domestic helps or for employing in restaurants and eateries. The ban was merely an extension of the Child Labour Act, 1986, under which children are prohibited from working in hazardous industrial units.

India, home to the world's largest number of child labourers (the official estimate is 11 million though the actual figure is estimated at over 100 million), is indeed keeping its dubious record intact — a fact exemplified by the countless Mithais across the country. They 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.

Some actions have been taken by the law-enforcing agencies but they have mostly remained just a farce. Take, for example, the televised raids on embroidery workshops across Delhi sometime back. About 550 boys aged between 5 and 15 were rescued from these shops, but no one could decide what to do with the children. So they were locked up in an empty shopping mall for a week, traumatised and miserable, until they found some temporary shelter. No one has heard about them after the TV cameras moved on to something more interesting.

Take the beedi industry. The average number of beedies 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.

And 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; a prohibition of child work before 8 am or after 7 pm; a mandatory day of rest every week; and the requirement that various health and safety precautions be observed.

Thankfully, there are some examples that stand out amidst all this gloom. The initiative, however, hasn't come from the law-enforcing authorities, but from some of the NGOs who have done pioneering work in this regard. Take this example set by SETU, an NGO, and Unicef.

A report brought out by the two organisations quotes children at a slaughter house at Parbhani, a small village near Aurangabad, as saying that they had to force the animals down with their tiny hands and then cut them. Over half of the workers at the abattoir were children between six and 14. They had to cut, skin and break cattle bones. Some had to even blow into the spleens of dead cattle as part of its cleaning ritual. The children belonged to the Qureshi community and the job was passed on from one generation to another. The abattoirs escaped the law by not putting the names of the children on the official rolls.

SETU and Unicef got into the act and helped rehabilitate all the 550 child-workers through a sustained programme of social mobilisation, education, health and women's empowerment.

Examples like this give some rays of hope for the Mithailals of the world.