Sweatshop boys

Early this month, 88 child labourers were rescued in police raids on two zari embroidery units, after pressure from child rights activists. The elegant end-product of their slavery had been due to make its way, as one child from Bihar’s Jehanabad district revealed, to posh shops in America and Saudi Arabia.

Welcome to the dark recesses of Brightly Shining India. To the grimy reality of sweatshop bondage cheek-by-jowl with the glittering dreams of globally aspirant Mumbai.

The everyday nature of the children’s plight was reinforced by the blase attitude of the police, who had to be prodded and pushed into taking action. ‘‘This karkhana falls under another station,’’ officers told activists. ‘‘There are no constables now, come some other day.’’

But if the police rescued the children grudgingly, they seemed to whole-heartedly resist the prospect of bringing to book their ‘employer’, Mushtaq Mohammed.

One of the children gave the police Mohammed’s phone number, but he declined a friendly invitation to come to the police station. Only after six days with no let-up in the media gaze on the case, was he arrested. The same day, Mohammed was released on bail for Rs 3,000—the equivalent of what he would pay Akhtar (16), one of his child labourers with seven years of ‘work experience’.

He defiantly declared that there was nothing wrong in what he was doing. What’s more, he could produce ‘guardians’ who would support him.

But if Akhtar—along with nearly 11 million other child workers (according to the 1991 census)—was being exploited by an employee who was able to take advantage of his family’s grinding poverty, he was also a victim of the very bureaucracies that were supposed to help him.

The day Mushtaq was arrested, a police inspector seemed to find the exercise pointless: ‘‘In reality, nothing can stop these kids coming from U.P. and Bihar’s villages,’’ he shrugged.

His sentiments echoed the exasperated, off-the-record rant of a senior official in the state’s labour department the previous day. ‘‘Don’t you understand?’’ he raved. ‘‘It is humanly impossible to end child labour.’’

He didn’t seem to get the irony that his job—along with hundreds of others in State and Central ministries—was to do just that. But look at the official state figures on child labour in a yellowing file and witness the gap between officialdom and ground reality: Officially there are just 58 child labourers in Mumbai.

Speak to non-governmental professionals with long experience in the field and they’ll tell you that Union Labour Minister Sahib Singh Verma’s target of eradicating child labour by 2007 is in reality still decades away.

Rather, the problem is worsening, even as difficult questions about the needs, problems and futures of children like Akhtar are rendered unimportant in discussions of a young and vibrant under-35 India.

One activist argues that it is the dark side of ‘growth’—blind competition, cheaper labour and widening disparities—that has ‘‘subtly made possible an attitude that it is okay for children to work like this.’’

Wasn’t it revealing, she asked, that the global number of unemployed adults should approximate that of child labourers?

Poverty, unemployment, lack of schools and funds may make labourers out of children but apathetic bureaucratic attitudes ensure they can’t escape.