Child labour: it146;s a reality tale

Bibek Debroy's article on child labour, 8216;No fairy tales, please8217;, is a mix of faulty logic, inadequate historical explanations and malicious imputation of motives.

Bibek Debroy8217;s article on child labour, 8216;No fairy tales, please8217;, is a mix of faulty logic, inadequate historical explanations and malicious imputation of motives. Examples of infants getting PAN cards, of Kamal Hassan acting at the age of six, and so on are cited, and then he asks why we don8217;t ask for a ban on such labour. Here Debroy is seeking to base a policy on child labour on the rarest of circumstances. Children who work as models or who take part in sports are statistically insignificant when compared to the numbers slaving in sweatshops or as domestic servants.

Debroy8217;s second major point is that child labour came to an end in the US and in Europe, not because of bans or legislation but because of the Great Depression and the Industrial Revolution. There is some truth in these explanations but they do not tell the whole story. In the West, movements for the compulsory education of children also played an important role in getting children out of factories. This has been well documented by the late Myron Weiner in The Child and the State in India. In India today there is virtually no child labour in the factories in the formal sector but it is to be found in sectors that are not mechanised. The export value of many of these goods they produce lies in the fact that they are handmade. Therefore the use of child labour will continue unless there is legal and policy intervention.

Commentators like Debroy criticise western governments for their 8216;protectionist8217; policies and make sweeping baseless allegations that NGOs who raise the issue of child labour in India at international fora are on the payrolls of western governments. This is to deflect attention from the fact that Indian elites don8217;t care about what happens to poor children.

Laws are necessary but not sufficient conditions for abolishing child labour. They must be accompanied by policies of compulsory education. The problem of taking a sectoral approach to child labour is that when child labour is banned in one sector, it moves to another. Or the strategy changes. When child labour in the carpet industry was banned, factory owners started supplying looms to weavers at home as the law allowed children to continue to work, provided they were part of family labour. It is pointless to try and distinguish between child labour and child work or between hazardous and non-hazardous employment. Work that is seemingly non-hazardous for adults becomes hazardous for children because they have no negotiating power. That is precisely why they are in so much demand. Debroy is cynical about the efficacy of enforcing a ban on child labour when so many other acts such as the Minimum Wages Act are not being enforced. Part of the problem is that there is so little 8216;public action8217; on issues such these. Wherever there has been public action, child labour has reduced.

The debate about whether child labour should be banned or regulated is not new. It surfaced in 1985 when the GoI claimed that 8220;child labour was a harsh reality8221; and found it more prudent to regulate rather than ban it: the Child Labour Act, 1986 8212; an act without teeth and innumerable loopholes 8212; was passed. It does not, for instance, cover children working in agriculture. Today the largest employers of children are farmers growing BT cotton in states like Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka where, according to Davuluri Venkateswarlu8217;s recent study, more than 2,00,000 children below 14 work from daybreak to dusk in cross-pollination work. This work may seem 8220;light and non-hazardous8221;, but the reality is that the fields are sprayed with pesticides and the children live and work there.

Laws wants to make child labour disappear overnight, but if employers of child labour are penalised and basic education improves, the incidence of child labour will definitely decrease. Andhra8217;s M.V. Foundation has been able to get lakhs of children out of work and into schools. There are many such organisations which have shown that child labour can be eliminated through a process of social mobilisation and community empowerment. However, in order to do this, you need a regulatory framework with teeth.

Demanding abolition of child labour has nothing to do with 8216;bleeding hearts8217; but with a genuine belief that every citizen has the right to equal opportunity. Debroy needs to spend time looking at what children are doing and under what conditions, to understand that those who want child labour abolished are not basing their responses on 8220;knee-jerk emotional reactions to Dickensian descriptions8221;. The fact is that children below 14 years are working in abysmal conditions for 10-12 hours a day. Such long hours cannot be equated with child8217;s play.

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One would have thought that there would be a sense of national outrage at this appalling state of affairs.

The writer8217;s has authored 8216;Born to Work: Child Labour in India8217;

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