A Text-Bookish Approach

This volume deals with another area that has become a pathetic tale of pompous declarations. You can hear politicians lovingly modulating their voices to deliver statements like: Neither tradition nor economic necessity can justify child labour; Child labour is a sad reality of our world. Wherever it is practised, it has to be eliminated; Exploitative child labour... is a moral outrage and an affront to human dignity; Children must grow as the brightest flowers in the countrys garden.

Childrens Day, Decade of the Girl Child, the International Year of the Child there are occasions aplenty to make these statements. And every few years a convention is drawn up to which all nations become enthusiastic signatories: the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), World Declaration on Education for All (1990). They pledge once again to do everything in their mite to abolish child labour, to guarantee universal education for children. Yet, statistics tell a different story. In India, for instance, child labour is said to be growing at the rate of 4 per cent annually.

Restoring Childhood is a documentation of the issues that plague the growth of children in this sub-continent (excluding Nepal) poverty, lack of education and gender differentiation. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have all got laws in place to prevent the abuse of children for long hours in unhealthy conditions. Yet, child labour is a rampant evil. A lot of it is invisible since children are mostly employed in the unorganised sector or in households of which officials would rather plead ignorance. Thus statistical information is never completely reliable.

A misnomer addressed in the very beginning of the volume is the idea of education as a panacea for child labour. This logic brushes aside the reason for their being assigned roles as breadwinners in the first place, which is abject poverty. It is perhaps this tendency to see issues in isolation that defeats most efforts to ameliorate or rectify existing conditions, argues the author.

All three countries have seen a reduction in budgetary spending on education over the years. Pakistan prioritises higher education over primary education. Nine per cent of Bangladeshs total civilian labour force consists of children between the ages of 10 and 12. Only Sri Lanka presents a heartening difference. Easy accessibility to schools combined with incentives like the mid-day meal scheme has made for greater literacy in that country, despite the fact that education is not compulsory there. And it has in place stringent anti-child abuse laws.

Strangely, noises in the international arena have dictated corrective action to counter the exploitation of children in these countries. The most obvious case in point is the carpet industry. But media attention usually spawns only ad hoc and piecemeal attempts to mitigate the problem.

But who are these children? The Census lists all individuals below the age of 15 as children. In the eyes of the Constitution, children are those under the age of 14 and in the strictly legal sense, a person below the age of 18 is still a minor. Though the Directive Principles of State Policy talk of free and compulsory education of all children up to the age of 14. But this is not enforceable nor, perhaps, desirable unless other means are found to provide for the family that requires the earnings of each of its members, including its children. Besides, there are neither enough schools nor teachers. And there is no way of preventing dropouts.

It is the urban exploitation of children that is most visible. Maximum non-governmental and other initiatives have also been in urban areas. Rural India also sees boys being recruited to help in cultivation efforts, while girls help in the household or contribute as extra hands in agriculture. Most of these are family efforts and hence difficult to categorise as offensive or exploitative instances of child labour.

`Women and children are often reckoned as one segment of the workforce. There are a number of units known to employ `women and children like the toothbrush packing unit of Colgate-Palmolive, or the silk screen printing section that prepares labels for containers and jars for Vicco Vajradanti.

However, it is not yet known in which sectors they tend to get competitive.

The book is a good reference book on issues pertaining to the plight of children in the sub-continent. It also offers fairly exhaustive accounts of the legislation effected at various times in these countries to counter these problems. But despite its rather evocative title, it is very much of a drab social science text-book.

Sumi Krishna Konark Publications Rs 300/236 pages