Child Labour: A Social Cause

       Give your child a pencil, but not a plate to wash!

 Child Labour occurs when children are forced to take up work at an age they need to study and enjoy the phase of innocence. Child Labour leads to the loss of childhood and escalates the exploitation of children in various forms.

India faces situations where children are forced to work under adverse conditions. Despite Laws against Child Labour, many children remain exploited as cheap Labour as the authorities are unable to implement strict laws and actions to protect children. Society and law-makers must eradicate child Labour in India.

In India, children are forced to work illegally in multiple industries. However, Agriculture is the largest sector that employs children to contribute to the family income. Indian rural sectors employ 85 percent of children due to various social factors that fail to meet their lifestyle.

Despite constitutional provisions to abolish Child Labour, many children remain exploited under hazardous work conditions. Due to paid Labour, children abandon their studies to support their families. They are made to forego all the wonders of childhood by the ruthless world.

Causes of Child Labour

The leading causes of Child Labour in India are social inequality, lack of education, and poverty. According to UNICEF’s report, children from the impoverished and rural parts of the world have no available alternatives such as teachers and schools.

Many rural communities lack adequate school facilities and the availability of schools. The low paying economy blooms with low cost, easy to hire, and child Labour. Besides the unorganized Agricultural sector, child Labour exists in unorganized assembly, unorganized retail works, and unorganized trade sectors.

Other factors of child Labour include the size of the informal economy, the inability of most Indian industries to scale up, lack of modern technologies, and the structure and inflexibility of the Indian market.

Bonded child Labour

Children are employed due to social obligation, or loans and debts made by the families. Usually, children are forced to employ their families in brick kilns, stone and quarries, and agricultural sectors.

The children of the migrant workers and those that belong to the marginalized sections and Dalits in the society are pledged to work in small production houses and factories in the urban areas. Child Labourers on the bond are usually subjected to physical, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse, even leading to death.

In Orissa, the people of the lower section of the society sell their daughters belonging to eight to 10 years of age, as maidservants to the clear their debts.

Lack of implementation of Laws

The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, was the only enacted provision by the Indian Constitution against child Labour and its atrocities. Other provisions stated by the Indian Constitution are:

• Article 24 of the Indian Constitution states that no child below the age of fourteen shall employ in any hazardous employment or factory but not in non-hazardous industries.
• Article 39(f)) of the Indian Constitution states that children and young adults are to be protected against moral and material abandonment or any forms of exploitation.

Various other Laws and the Indian Penal Code, such as The Factories Act,1948, The Mines Act,1952, the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) of Children Act-2000, and the Child Labour (Prohibition and Abolition) Act-1986 seek to prevent the practice of child Labour in India.

Unfortunately, these laws and regulations lack active and proper implementation and enforcement.

THE PRICE OF CHILD LABOR

• 152 million children worldwide are victims of child labor; 88 million are boys and 64 million are girls.
• Girls may be more present in less visible and therefore under-reported forms of child labor such as domestic service in private households, and girls are much more likely than boys to shoulder responsibility for household chores, a form of work not considered in child labor estimates
• Girls who leave school early do so disproportionately to undertake responsibility for chores within their own homes, while boys are more likely to leave school prematurely in order to join the labor force.
• 48 percent of all victims of child labor are aged 5-11 years.
• Almost half of child labor victims (73 million) work in hazardous child labor; more than one-quarter of all hazardous child labor is done by children less than 12 years old (19 million).
• Almost half of child workers are in Africa (72.1 million); 41 percent (62.1 million) are in Asia and the Pacific.
• 71 percent of child labor takes place in agriculture, which includes fishing, forestry, livestock herding and aquaculture.
• 19 percent of child labor victims live in low income countries; 2 million victims live in high-income countries.
• There is a strong correlation between child labor and situations of conflict and disaster. The incidence of child labor in countries affected by armed conflict is 77 percent higher than the global average; the incidence of hazardous work is 50 percent higher.
• Forced labor is thought to generate around $150 billion a year in illegal profits. 
• More than two-thirds of all children in child labor (69.1 percent) work as contributing family laborers on family farms and in family enterprises, not in an employment relationship with a third-party employer.
• Children forced by their household circumstances or other factors to leave school prior to their fifteenth birthday are less likely to ever find jobs and those who do find jobs take much longer to do so. 
• Former child laborers are much more likely to have only primary education or less. 
• Young persons who worked as children (up to the age of 15) are more likely to be in low-paying jobs.