Can these children access a future?

The notification on child labour has kicked in, but we need to get the methodology right

Most of those concerned with child labour, see it as a product of poverty. Therefore, while poverty cannot be ended with immediate effect, a child can be provided with ameliorative measures. So they talk of non-formal schooling for working children with timings that suit their working hours, mid-day meals and recreation facilities at the site of their work. They talk of legislating against their employment in hazardous industries, institutions that provide training in skill development, and so on, in order to ease the conditions that give rise to child labour.

As it is poverty that pushes an unfortunate child into employment, the advocates of ameliorative measures create an environment in which nobody can be blamed for conditions that makes child labour possible. As the argument goes, parents need supplementary income, so in poor households not only must fertility rates need to be substantially high, the children need to be employed at the earliest; politicians cannot legislate against the use of child labour, as it would have an adverse impact on their electoral fortunes; bureaucrats cannot enforce existing legislations since they cannot overlook the parents8217; poverty.

It would be interesting to view childhood poverty from the perspective of the 8216;access approach8217;. The 8216;access approach8217; provides an identity to the child who often otherwise is seen as a victim. Such a perspective has a built-in enabling mechanism. How best to enable a child to grow into an empowered adult is the centre of this perspective. It interrogates the nature of the resource use rivalries in which children are inadvertently drawn but are scarcely asked to participate. That is as much a structural question as it is a question of the state8217;s, society8217;s and family8217;s investment in the child8217;s well-being. In this perspective the child is not seen as a tool in adult hands. Instead, it causes sharp questions to be raised regarding the access to and quality of education that the state provides.

The access approach enables us to see why Kerala has the best literacy rate, and Bihar, one of the worst. The 2005 State Report Card on elementary education in India based on data drawn from the District Information System for Education and brought out by the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration shows that Bihar, an educationally backward state, has 53,275 schools for 57,185 villages, whereas Kerala has 11,684 schools for 2,989 villages. Kerala has almost four schools per village, Bihar not even one. Accessibility is not limited to school infrastructure alone. The access approach should make the policy-makers serious about addressing the issue of discrimination against SC/ST children in general schools. It will bring to the fore the positive role of female teachers in increasing the access of girls .

How we address the different aspects of accessibility shall determine our success in achieving universal elementary education. The access approach puts the onus on the policy makers rather than on parents, and this is the only right course in a country which has been falsely and self-servingly implicated as the cradle of child labour.