�The child is father of the man� - William Wordsworth
Child is a bundle of joys a flower incarnate in person. A
flickering smile of the child pleases everyone. The brightness
and future welfare of the society is closely interwoven with the
brightness of the child and its careful upbringing. Childhood is
the most important period of life, as it shapes adulthood. The
very initiation of life-making starts at childhood. The early
lesson of the child starts from the cradle. Parents adopt
different methods to rear up the child in different ages, to
make it a happy man or woman later. The mother being closer, has
a greater responsibility to train up the child well from the
very infancy.
(more content follows the advertisement below) A D V E R T I S E M E N T
If one desires to know a nation, he should look for it into
its children. Child is not only the future of the nation and its
aspirations but also, and mainly, its strength in reserve. The
future of nation is best insured if its children are healthy and
active, educated and informed, disciplined and trained, as well
as free from social prejudices, having a scientific outlook. It
is, therefore a duty cast on the society at large to protest
this crop of nation from the damaging effects of excessive
exposure to vagaries of climate, as well as, from social
oppression and injustice.
Talking all the aspects as a whole, the childhood is the most
significant period of one�s life. It is considered, and rightly
so, to be the very foundation of life on which depends the
entire structure the whole personality as such child the father
of man � is the natural future leader of the nation in every
walk of life, may it be industry, education, politics, social
services, administration defence, civil services or anything
else. It is during this formative period of moulding that the
life begins to acquire shape and substance, and the attitudes,
behaviours, manners and emotions do get developed.
CONCEPT OF CHILD LABOUR
The term �Child Labour� is, at times, used as a synonym for
�employed child� or �working child�. In this sense it is
co-extensive with any work done by a child for profit or reward.
But more commonly than not, the term �child labour� is used in a
derogatory sense. It suggests something which is hateful and
exploitative.
Thus, child labour is recognized by the sociologists,
development workers, educationists and medical professionals as
hazardous and injurious to the child, both physically and
mentally.
According to Shri. V.V.Giri, former president of
India, has thus distinguished the two concepts of the �child
labour�s: the term �child labour� is commonly interpreted in two
different ways: first, as an economic practice and secondly, as
a social evil. In the first context it signifies employed of the
children in gainful occupations with a view to adding to the
labour income of the family. It is in the second context that
the term child labour is now more generally used. In assessing
the nature and extent of the social evil, it is necessary to
take into account the character of the jobs on which the
children are engaged, the dangers to which they are exposed and
the opportunities of development which they have been denied.�
The term �child labour� applies to children engaged in all
types of activities whether these be industrial or
non-industrial but which are determined to their physical,
mental, moral and social well being and development. The brain
of a child develops anatomically till the age of ten, the lungs
till the age of fourteen and the muscles till the age of
seventeen. Anything which obstructs the natural growth of any or
all of these vital organs should be considered as determinate to
natural physical growth, or even hazardous.
SOME HISTORICAL ASPECT ON CHILD LABOUR IN INDIA
In ancient India it was the duty of the king to educate every
girl and boy and parents could be punished for not sending their
children to school called ashrams, which were really residential
schools under a guru (a learned sage). Child labour existed only
in the form of child slaves children, sometimes even less than 8
years of age, were purchased, to do so-called low and
dishonorable work. Kautilya (4th century B.C) considered it
degrading to make children work on such jobs and hence
prohibited the purchase and sale of slave children below 8
years.
Children, however, helped their parents in household
activities and family crafts. They learnt the skills by
observing and participating in such activities. A predominantly
rural society is inevitably characterized by small and marginal
economic units. India, through its medieval period, was no
exception. Increasing pressure on land led to fragmentation of
holdings. Growing families had to look beyond personal
cultivation for subsistence. A class of landless labourers came
into existence, often bonded to the large landowners. These
labourers used their children to help in their economic
activities. The rural artism rarely worked alone. Infact the
entire family was a work unit with the �pater familia� being the
master craftsman. Occupations were determined largely on the
basis of heredity, and children were introduced to their
traditional craft at a young age.
NATURE OF CHILD WORK
From time immemorial it has been the practice that children were
to engage themselves in some sort of work or the other, both in
home and in the field. In olden days, children of tender age
performed even toilsome work alongwith adult agricultural and
other workers. In the medieval period, children used to be
engaged as trainees under the guidance of their parents to learn
traditional crafts of the family.
In agriculture, children are employed not on agricultural
operations but in non-agricultural operations also. They are
employed in such diverse agricultural operations as ploughing,
sowing, transplanting, weeding, harvesting threshing and
guarding the crops, etc.
In plantations, child labour is a part of family labour. They
assist their parents in plucking of leaves and coffee berries,
or collecting of latex, or they do some secondary jobs, such as,
weeding, spreading of fertilizers, the care of nurseries,
digging of drains, etc. they are also employed to pick out
stalks and coarse leaves of tea spread over the green leaves in
the shadow.
There is also an increasing concern about the accident and
disease incident among child agricultural workers, controls on
hazardous insecticides and pesticides are deficient and neither
the children nor their parents receive any instruction as how to
use them safely. The same is true of mechanical operations.
Children in cities perform much larger varieties of
activities than those in villages because of the extensively
diversified structure of urban economics. Often, children are
employed for packing, labeling, etc., in the factories. Other
industries in which children are engaged are match factories,
bidi manufacturing, mica cutting, wood and cork, furniture and
fixture, printing, publishing and allied trades, leather
products, rubber and rubber products, machinery, transport
equipment, lock factories, gem cutting and polishing, potteries,
glass bangle industries, brass work, carpet industries and
personal services like laundaries, deying and cleaning.
Millions of small boys and girls are engaged in the
unorganized sector, comprising hotels, restaurants, canteens,
wayside �dhabas�, shops, repair workshop, and establishments of
various types. They also work as hawkers, coolies, shoe-shine
boys and venders. In big cities, children can be seen cleaning
and washing automobiles just for a trip. The bigger the city,
the higher is the persistent demand for teenagers to work as
domestic servants and it is there that they are often subjected
to worst types of exploitation without any means of
protections-legal or social on the kitchen floor and are, as a
rule, not permitted to attend school. Sexual abuse is also
reported to be frequent.
In a good number of occupations child worker is invariably
exposed to risks of various nature because of his tender age.
For instance, he is likely to suffer burn injuries while working
round about big ovens, or while carrying hot beverages; the
newspaper hawkers and shoe-shine boys are exposed to the risk of
road accident; rag-pickers may get cut injuries from glass
pieces or broken tin cans; or the child working on construction
sites alongwith his parents may sustain injuries while carrying
brick or stone loads.
Interestingly, children are sometimes also employed as
performing artists. They are given roles in films, and in circus
they perform acrobatic feats, Magicians and jugglers use them as
�Jamura� (the helping boy) and they are also used by them for
arousing public sympathy at wayside shows for alms.
Some writers and social workers are of the view that begging
is a major field of operations where children are put to work.
Mrs. Sengupta has observed.:
�Our seething millions where child employment is rife and has
become a various form of exploitation �.. begging is becoming a
real profession and there are scaring rumours that gangsters and
syndicates of inhuman beings trade in human babies and children.
Certainly the mother clad in a rag and clutching a baby in her
arms is a sight that is shameful. Children are drugged or even,
one hears, tortured. To see pavement dwellers in all their
horrors living in filth, children picking up rejected and
popping food mixed with filth into their mouths makes one feel
desperate: but no one seem to do prevent from flaunting drugged
babies or little tots on the road and to use them for employment
purposes.�
Curiously, some well to do urban families, having connections
in the country-side, take in some child of a poor relative,
ostensibly, for supporting the child out of sympathy for the for
the poor relatives, but he or she eds up as a domestic servant
with no opportunity for education.
It has been also discovered that a sizable number of children
ranging between 5 to 12 years of age had actually been kidnapped
from different places to weave carpets and were forced to work
for as long as 22 hours a day. These children treated like
virtual slaves, were found to bear scar marks of torture. They
were, reportedly, severely beaten even with iron rods, if they
were deficient in work or committed errors in weaving.
The most nefarious rather barbarian form of child
exploitation is the practice of bonded labour. The child is
handed over by the loaner as security or collateral security
against small sums of loan obtained at an exorbitant rate of
interest. The bonded child usually gets only a handful of coarse
grain for his subsistence. He has to toil very hard and exists
at the mercy of his lord for the whole of life without the least
hope of redemption. The mortgagee is usually some big landlord,
money �lender or the village businessman and the mortgager is
the poor landless labourer. Through this practice is prevalent
in many parts of rural India, it is predominant in Vellore
district of Tamil Nadu but with a distinguishing feature that
there the bonded child is allowed to stay with his parents on
the condition that he must present him self at work daily at 8
a.m. The practice of bounded labour is still prevalent dispite
stringent laws against it which provide for imprisonment of, and
imprisonment of, and imposition of fine on, the guilty.
CAUSES OF CHILD LABOUR
Child labour is a socio-economic phenomenon. It is generally
concerned that illiteracy, ignorance, low wages, unemployment,
poor standard of living, stark poverty, deep social prejudices
and appalling backwardness of the country-side are all,
severally and collectively, the root causes of child labour.
Mr Madan, Deputy Director, Ministry of Labour, is of the
view that �the children are required to seek employment either
to augment the income of their families or to have a gainful
occupation in the absence of availability of school going
facilities at various places.�
It has been officially stated that, �child labour is no
longer a medium of economic exploitation but is necessitated by
economic necessity of the parents and in many cases that of the
child himself.� Prof. Gangrade believes that child labour
is a product of such factors as customs, traditional attitude,
lack of school or reluctance of parents to send their children
to school, urbanization, industrialization, migration and so on.
AGE LIMIT
The Indian constitution in its article 24 lays down that, �No
child below the age of 14 years shall be employed to work in any
factory or mine or engaged in any other hazardous employment.�
The abuse of the tender age can be stopped by bringing these
vast unorganized sectors under legislative control. We see that
children employed in different occupations and different states
are subject to different set of regulations and treatment. But
our primary interest is to save the tender aged children from
health risks, hazardous and other forms of exploitation. The
complex socio-economic conditions in different social milieu may
not advocate the uniform age limit. But this should not rule out
the possibility of acceptance of age uniformity, though child
labour (Prohibitions and Regulation) Act has brought about much
needed uniformity in certain cases. Not only in our country, but
also in almost all other countries of the world the
non-uniformity of age regulation is still in existence. The most
widely covered and most strictly regulated sector is industry.
Fifty-four of the member countries for which such information is
available, have fixed the minimum age for industrial employment
at 14. A higher age � 15 or 16 is the general rule in another
forty-five and a lower one -12 or 13 � in just over a dozen. In
case of non-industrial employment national laws and regulations
are naturally extremely diverse. The majority of countries have,
in principle, a uniform minimum age of 14, 15 or 16 years for
all employment (disregarding agriculture for the moment).
But in our country where dire poverty is manifest in every
walk of life what will be the minimum age for child labour? The
International Labour Organization in its Convention No. 138
(1973), in Article 3 had clearly stated, �The minimum age for
admission to any type of employment or work which by its nature
or the circumstances in which it is carried out is likely to
jeopardise the health, safety or morals of young persons shall
not be less than 18 years.� If India ratifies this convention,
millions of children will be thrown out of employment. In the
present socio-economic condition in the country it is difficult
to prescribe the minimum age. It will make the problem of
unemployment and poverty more acute. But for the sake of
uplifting the future standards of employment as well as to
protect the children from such abuse of their tender age, at
least we can appeal to our government to provide free and
compulsory education to every child up to the age of 14 years.
The law �makers must keep in mind the recommendation of the
Convention No. 138. age limits should be gradually raised to a
level consistent with the fullest physical and mental growth and
development of child workers as recommended by the International
Labour Organization to save the children from the clutches of
social injustice and deprivation and to ensure for them a happy
normal growth in the national interest of every country.
HOURS OF WORK
The health and efficiency of the workers depend mostly on the
hours of work. Long hours of work are harmful not only for moral
and physical development, but also retard efficiency.
Considering our climate and geophysical conditions the hours of
work should be lowered. The long working days minimize the
working life. So it is less productive in the long run. Shorter
working days are also less productive, but it provides more
employment. The socio-economic conditions of India demands
shorter working hours. The tender age of the working children
should be protected from the onslaught of rigorous working
hours. The environment of the working places, such as, hotels,
restaurants, tea-stalls, and sweet-shops is most uncongenial to
the development of the child. But the working children devote 16
to 20 hours daily to serve the clients.
According to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation)
Act, 1986, no child shall be permitted to work more than a
period of 6 hours inclusive one hours rest in one day. Moreover
short working hours, with rest intervals would enable the child
workers to perform their duties efficiently and happily. The
most surprising thing is that the employer hardly takes any care
to make a difference between the child and the adult worker.
Naturally working children become the victim of exploitation.
Working hour should be restricted in such a way that they may be
permitted to part time education. The most striking thing is
that no special provision have been made regarding the condition
of work, conservancy services whole- some drinking water,
medical facilities, accident benefits, rest, etc., for the child
workers. They should enjoy the same facilities like the adult
workers.
IMPLEMENTATION OF SCHEMES
Our constitution provides, as a fundamental right, that no child
below the age of fourteen years shall be employed in any
factory, or mine, or be engaged in any other hazardous
occupation. Once Dr. Rajendra Prasad had remarked, �We might
search our hearts and ask ourselves whether we have done
everything possible to implement this directive.�
According to the report of the National Commission on Labour,
the employment of children in factories, mines, plantations or
in other organized sectors has been decreasing. However, this
report adds that it continues to persist in varying degrees in
the unorganized sector, such as, small plantations, restaurants,
hotels, cotton ginning and weaving, carpet weaving, stone
breaking, brick kiln, handicrafts and road building, etc.
Employment of children, who are below the prescribed age, was
also reported to be continuing at far off places and in rural
areas where enforcement of statutory provisions was all the more
difficult.
The real enforcement lies in the implementation. The positive
side of implementation is that law should have and validity. The
greedy employers do not care the existing laws. Like all other
countries several industrial activities such as manufacturing,
mines, construction and various kind of transport are dealt with
by separate laws and regulations. On the other hand the immature
children are in the dark about legal protection. Like all laws
should be properly administered. The essential feature of the
administration of labour law is inspection. A peculiar feature
is that the employer always tries to draw a screen before the
inspector. Inspector hardly gets any opportunity to identify the
child for verify his age and the other working conditions.
Children do not come openly to the inspector to report about
their grievances.
INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION AND CHILD LABOUR
The basic aim of the ILO to abolish Child Labour altogether is
yet a distant goal in view of the present economic setup of the
World. It has taken measures to protect the working children and
to ameliorate their working and living conditions and to impart
job-based education. The United Nations declaration of the
rights of the child says:
�The child shall enjoy special protection and shall
be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other
means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally,
spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in
conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for
this purpose the best interests of the child shall be the
paramount consideration.�
It further states that: �the child shall be protected
against all forms of neglect, cruelty and exploitation. He shall
not be the subject of traffic, in any form. The child shall not
be admitted to employment before an appropriate minimum age; he
shall in no case be caused or permitted to be engaged in any
occupations or employment which would prejudice his health or
education, or interfere with his physical, mental or moral
development.�
Best blessings on those
Little, innocent lives
Bloomed on earth,
Who have brought the message
Of joy from heavenly garden
- Rabindra Nath Tagore
It is the bounded duty of the country to provide for atleast
free primary education for all children. One must remember that
the industrialization can wait but youth does not last long.
This right to primary education must be for all the present
time, and not a dubious or ambiguous must be for the present for
some defined future. The basic guarantees of our Constitutional
must be fulfilled here and now.
Therefore, so far as the projects for development of human
resources are concerned, the programme for welfare of children
must be given top priority. It is only in this way that children
can be trained to be good future citizen, mentally alert and
prosperous. We should aim at providing proper and equal
opportunities for development to all children in the light of
the above mentioned constitutional directives. It is only then
that we can fulfill our aspirations and achieve our objectives
of social justice and equality enshrined in our constitution.
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