Earn while you learn

The government's decision to extend the ban on child labour to households as well as a few businesses is welcome, and no one would disagree with the observations of the Technical Advisory Committee on Child Labour that the occupations in question are hazardous for children as they are subjected to physical violence, psychological trauma, and even sexual abuse. Any initiative like this should be supported in a country which is home to the world's largest number of child labourers (the official estimate is 11 million though the actual figure is probably over 75 million). Studies by the International Labour Organisation have shown that over a million children work as bonded labourers in India.

The problem of course is that legislative intention has never been the constraint as far as India's growing problem with child labour is concerned. Since 1933, there have been laws in force that ban or regulate child labour, including Article 24 of the Constitution, which expressly prohibits it. The Child Labour Act of 1986 also prohibits child labour in hazardous industries. But if none of these provisions has been effective in curtailing its proliferation and millions of children still continue to work in wretched conditions, there are many reasons.

For example, few will take seriously the labour ministry's warning in the latest notification that anyone employing a child below 14 years of age would be liable for prosecution and penal action, and that labour inspectors would check households for violations. It is an open secret that lack of enforcement due to untrained staff, and corruption are the key problems in the government's efforts to minimise child labour. The other reasons are also well-known""grinding poverty, and the lack of a social security network and education. Human Rights Watch studies have shown that, in quite a few rural areas, a child's income accounts for as much as 40 per cent of the total household income, and over 65 per cent of the children said that poverty was the reason why they worked. What is worse is that parents still exchange their child's labour with local moneylenders for as little as Rs 3,000.

An example of a country where compulsory education has worked to reduce child labour is Sri Lanka, where school participation rates have risen from 58 per cent in 1946 to over 90 per cent now. The corresponding result has been that the employment rate of children in the 10 to 14 age group has shown a substantial decline from 13 per cent in 1946 to less than 5 per cent now. The secret of that country's success has been education-based earning, with a strict monitoring of the funds so that leakage is kept to the minimum. India too has seen several such examples at the non-governmental level. When Unicef and SETU, an NGO, rescued a few child labourers from a slaughter house in a Maharashtra village, the danger was that poverty would force them to go back after a while. The two organisations solved the problem by initiating education-based earning""i.e. earn while you learn. Though India's experiments at the government level have not been encouraging, an improved version of the study-and-earn system seems to be the best solution to keep child labour in check.