All work, no play for India’s army of toiling children
*By Bappa Majumdar *
Subhankar Baidya can’t bring himself to discuss his ordeal as an abused domestic servant. Instead, the five-year-old boy draws pictures to show the beatings and humiliations he endured until his rescue.
“I don’t want to get beaten up again and wipe floors,” said the traumatised boy, rescued by social workers from a suburban Kolkata house in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal a few weeks ago following complaints from neighbours of mistreatment.
“I want to play,” he said.
Baidya’s fate is typical of millions of Indian children under 14 who are employed to clean homes and run errands, or slog away in restaurants, tea stalls and at holiday resorts for a pittance. The Indian government says it is determined to put a stop to these tales of misery…
While welcoming the move, sociologists and officials fear the ban will have little effect without a concrete plan to provide for children often forced into the workforce by extreme poverty…
The government says there are more than 11 million child labourers in India.
Rights groups put the figure closer to 60 million, with many still working in hazardous industries such as fireworks and glass factories, despite the 1986 government ban and Supreme Court orders demanding better enforcement.
Child labourers also work on farms, at carpet weaving factories or in textile plants – where their supple hands and nimble fingers are better suited to the often intricate work.
Two worlds in one: In Mumbai, India’s bustling capital of films and finance, more than 50,000 children work in gold-polishing and leather-stitching factories, in stark contrast to kids from rich families who pack amusement parks on weekends.
But much of the country’s demand for child labour is met by the eastern states of West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand where grinding rural poverty give parents little choice but to send their children out to work…
“Most children are irrevocably sick or deformed by the time they reach adulthood,” said Mansoor Qadri of Mumbai-based children’s rights group, Saathi, or Friend…
There is a lot of work to do – 35 percent of India’s more than one billion people still live on less than a dollar a day despite annual economic growth rates of about eight percent. reuters
One: It’s cruel to employ children.
Two: I don’t understand why people still have so many children in Hindustan when they well know they can’t afford to raise them?
Three: Why do managers employ children in factories when they can employ young strong men?