Child labor

On Sunday we spent the entire evening trying to locate a radio. We don’t have a single radio or a transistor in the house! BBC World was going to broadcast a program — Talk Time — on the worldwide problem of child labor and slavery, and my sister-in-law, Mridula, had been invited by the BBC London to ask a question by telephone. Somehow she had the notion that the program would be broadcast on radio and not on TV. She lives in Gurgaon and we live in New Delhi, so Alka came up with the idea that we’d call her and she would place the phone near the radio. So this is how we listened to a part of the program.

To Alka’s great chagrin, when we switched on the TV, the same program was being telecast too, but now it was too late because Mridula’s question had already been asked and discussed. Anyway, this whole thing set in motion a chain of thought regarding the whole issue of child labor.

I think we can all agree that child labor is an evil problem. A few days ago I saw a photograph in the newspaper showing a 3-year-old child working somewhere in India. It was heart-wrenching as well as shameful because given the socio-economic conditions in the country, nothing much can be done. We as a society are responsible for this. Both at personal and at government level, child labor is taken as the done thing. Consider for example the dhobi (people who wash and iron clothes as a profession are known as ‘dhobis’ in India) that works in our block. His small children all day long fetch the unironed or dirty laundry from various houses and deliver the clean clothes. Come summer or winter, hot or cold, they are busy doing their work, and nobody seems to mind it. There was a small girl of the dhobi who used to attend school last year. Now she too helps the family. It’d be hypocritical to criticize the family for engaging the children in work, but what else can they do? It is better than wondering in the streets aimlessly and getting into one mischief or another. I know this would be considered as viewing the problem with escapist pessimism but frankly, this is much more preferable compared to children who have to forage for food in the garbage dumps..

The dhobi’s example is milder compared to all those unfortunate children hired by the biri factories and other hazardous industries where children are exposed to deadly chemicals and endless hours of hard labor. In some factories small children work for 18 hours a day for less than $10 a month. They work under inhuman conditions, without protection, without rest. Most children either don’t survive, or grow up to be weak, diseased adults, to again start the same cycle with their children.

The root cause of this problem is the overwhelming poverty that ails the country, and all other countries where child labor exists. Poverty, coupled with illiteracy, forces people to throw their small children into the clutches of life-threatening vocations. In fact, some extremely poor families produce a greater number of children so that there are more hands in the family to earn money

I don’t think child labor is a law-and-order problem. Banning the industries that engage child laborors will only exacerbate the problem because child labor is same as prostitution: you stymie it in the open then it thrives in secrecy. Banning the industries is like taking a pain-killer without tackling the ailment. If these children don’t work, what do they do? Beg? Die of starvation? Become criminals? There is not enough social support in the country to discourage child labor, and the effort has to come from all the sides. If there is an overall improvement in the living standards of the families, child labor will vanish on its own. To be frank, no sane parent wants his or her child to grow up in a stifling environment.

The government has started various incentive schemes such as free food and clothes for children who attend schools but these schemes don’t seem to be working even in the affluent states such as Punjab. The incentives never reach the needy ones, and sometimes the teachers are so incompetent (if at all there is a school and there is a teacher in the school) that children prefer to sweat in a kiln rather than sit in a class. So we can see that everything is inter-connected, at least in India.

Child labor persists because of the rampant corruption, a gut-wrenching poverty, all-pervading illiteracy, over-population and our general indifference. We need to find solutions to all these problems and only then we can seriously talk about abolishing child labor. Ignore a lose end and the entire effort fails.