The next time you sip your tea or glug your fruit juice at the local restaurant or a food joint, keep an eye out for those who clean your table, wash your tea cup, and mop the floor. The next time you hire a maid, check who accompanies her and helps her wash your clothes and your vessels. The next time you award a small contract to refurbish your house that requires carpentry, painting or masonry, watch out for those who help out the artisans, even as your children get ready to go to school. This is not all. There are other areas of our economy that thrive on children’s physical input – Carpet making, Gem stone industry, Cracker Industry, transportation, Agriculture and the Leisure Industry
The latest International Labor Organization estimates for the world, released in September 2013, indicate that the number of child laborers has declined by one third since 2000, from 246 million to 168 million. The number of children in hazardous work stands at 85 million, down from 171 million in 2000. Most of this advance was achieved between 2008 and 2012, when the global number fell by 47 million, from 215 to 168 million, and the number of children in hazardous work fell by 30 million, from 115 to 85 million. Despite this progress, the 2016 target set by the international community for the elimination of the worst forms of child labor, as a priority within the global fight for the eradication of all child labor, will not be met.
In India, according to the Census 2001 figures there are 1.26 crore working children in the age group of 5-14 as compared to the total child population of 25.2 crore. There are approximately 12 lakh children working in the hazardous occupations/processes which are covered under the Child Labor (Prohibition & Regulation) Act i.e. 18 occupations and 65 processes. As per a survey conducted by National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) in 2004-05, the number of working children is estimated at 90.75 lakhs.
The root causes of child labor must be addressed if progress is to be made and social protection is a key part of the alleviation response. Social protection helps to give all children an equal opportunity to fulfill their potential and live healthy, happy and productive lives.
Obviously the primary responsibility for formulating national social protection strategies and expanding the delivery of national social security systems to cover as much of the population as possible rests with government, but workers’ and employers’ organizations and NGO’s also have a key role to play. These social partners can assist the government in integrating child labor concerns into the design, implementation and monitoring of national policies and ensure that they address child labor more effectively.
This year, World Day against Child Labor, June 12th, draws attention to the role of social protection in keeping children out of child labor and removing them from it. Social protection is both a human right and makes sound economic and social sense. Social protection enables access to education, health care and nutrition and plays a critical role in the fight against child labor. In 2013, at the III Global Conference on Child Labor in Brasilia, the international community adopted the Brasilia Declaration, which stresses the need for decent work for adults, free, compulsory and quality education for all children, and social protection for all.
Echoing those priorities, World Day against child labor 2014 calls for action to introduce, improve and extend social protection, in line with the ILO Recommendation No. 202 on social protection floors (basically minimum social guarantees, National social security systems that are sensitive to children’s needs and help fight child labor and Social protection that reaches out to especially vulnerable groups of children.
Recommendation 202 – Recommendation concerning National Floors of Social Protection
Adoption: Geneva, 101st ILC session (14 Jun 2012)
This Recommendation provides guidance to Members to: (a) establish and maintain, as applicable, social protection floors as a fundamental element of their national social security systems; and (b) implement social protection floors within strategies for the extension of social security that progressively ensure higher levels of social security to as many people as possible, guided by ILO social security standards. For the purpose of this Recommendation, social protection floors are nationally defined sets of basic social security guarantees which secure protection aimed at preventing or alleviating poverty, vulnerability and social exclusion.
Social protection helps keep children out of work:
Poverty and socio economic shocks play a key role in driving children to work. Poor households are more likely to have to resort to child labor to meet basic needs and deal with uncertainty. Exposure to shocks, resulting in loss of family income, can have a similar effect on household decisions.
For example, economic shocks, such an adult member of the family losing his/her job, health-related shocks like a serious illness or an employment injury, and agriculture-related shocks, such as drought, flood and crop failure, can dramatically reduce household incomes and cause children to drop out of school and go to work to contribute to the family income.
Social protection aims at providing support to poor families, and assistance to help them to weather various shocks. Social protection instruments which are most helpful in combating child labor include:
• Cash and in-kind transfer programmes that enhance income security for families and facilitate access to education and health care, conditional or not, help prevent child labor, and promote enrolling children into schools, taking children for health check-ups. (India now has several such programmes including the MNREGA Schemes with the facility of Direct to beneficiary schemes)
• Public employment programmes, which provide jobs for adults to build and improve roads, schools, health centers and the like, helping to ensure that it is adults who are at work and not children. (India has its MNREGA Schemes)
• Social health protection, which ensures access to health care and financial protection in case of sickness, and can stop households sending children to work when a member of the household falls ill. ( Several States are grappling with this issue and how to implement it)
• Maternity benefits, that protect pregnant women and recent mothers and allow caring for new-born children, have a key impact on improving the health of mothers and children and avoid that older children have to work to replace the mothers’ lost income. (this is already in place but inadequate)
• Social protection for people with disabilities and those who suffer from employment-related injuries or diseases, prevent households from resorting to child labor. (Workmen’s Compensation and Disability Pension are available to such citizens but it’s not enough)
• Income security in old age, providing pensions to older people helps protect younger generations by contributing to the economic security of the household as a whole. (Old age pensions are available but inadequate)
• Unemployment protection, which provides adults with at least partial income replacement, reduces the need to rely on the income of working children when facing job loss. (this is something prevalent in European Countries but not implemented in India due to un-viability)
These instruments complement one another; cash benefits and services need to be well coordinated and corruption free. The Cash to beneficiary system appears to be a useful step in this direction. There is no single social protection instrument for addressing child labor. A well-designed social security system will include a specific mix of interventions, designed to best fit the national needs.
The Indian Experience:
Child labor in India is an accepted endemic reality. Officially and legally speaking, anyone employing a child below 14 years of age attracts a maximum jail term of three years of a fine of up to Rs 50,000. But the fact of the matter is, such laws remain only on paper, and are very weakly enforced.
In February 2013, the union cabinet had given a nod to amending the existing law against child labor, in which all forms of child labor under the age of 14 years will be banned, any employment of children aged 14-18 years in hazardous work will be illegal, and child labor will become a cognizable offense.
As of now, the amendment is back with the labor department owing to the parliamentary standing committee’s request to review and relook the number of provisions in it. But even if the amendment is approved and becomes law, one wonders, will the issue of child labor really end with it?
So far, government statistics point to around 17 million child laborers in India. Unofficially, the number is believed to be closer to the 100 million mark.
Way back in 1979, Government formed its first committee, the Gurupadswamy Committee to study the issue of child labor and to suggest measures to tackle it. The Committee examined the problem in detail and made some far-reaching recommendations. It observed that as long as poverty continued, it would be difficult to totally eliminate child labor and hence, any attempt to abolish it through legal recourse would not be a practical proposition.
The Committee felt that in the circumstances, the only alternative left was to ban child labor in hazardous areas and to regulate and ameliorate the conditions of work in other areas. It recommended that a multiple policy approach was required in dealing with the problems of working children.
Based on the recommendations of Gurupadaswamy Committee, the Child Labor (Prohibition & Regulation) Act was enacted in 1986. The Act prohibits employment of children in certain specified hazardous occupations and processes and regulates the working conditions in others.
The list of hazardous occupations and processes is progressively being expanded on the recommendation of Child Labor Technical Advisory Committee constituted under the Act.
In consonance with the above approach, a National Policy on Child Labor was formulated in 1987. The Policy seeks to adopt a gradual & sequential approach with a focus on rehabilitation of children working in hazardous occupations & processes in the first instance.
The Action Plan outlined in the Policy for tackling this problem is as follows:
• Legislative Action Plan for strict enforcement of Child Labor Act and other labor laws to ensure that children are not employed in hazardous employments, and that the working conditions of children working in non-hazardous areas are regulated in accordance with the provisions of the Child Labor Act. It also entails further identification of additional occupations and processes, which are detrimental to the health and safety of the children.
• Focusing of General Developmental Programmes for Benefiting Child Labor – As poverty is the root cause of child labor, the action plan emphasizes the need to cover these children and their families also under various poverty alleviation and employment generation schemes of the Government.
• Project Based Plan of Action envisages starting of projects in areas of high concentration of child labor. Pursuant to this, in 1988, the National Child Labor Project (NCLP) Scheme was launched in 9 districts of high child labor endemicity in the country.
The Scheme envisages running of special schools for child labor withdrawn from work. In the special schools, these children are provided formal/non-formal education along with vocational training, a stipend of Rs.150 per month, supplementary nutrition and regular health checkups so as to prepare them to join regular mainstream schools.
Under the Scheme, funds are given to the District Collectors for running special schools for child labor. Most of these schools are run by the NGOs in the district.
 This is the major Central Sector Scheme for the rehabilitation of child labor.
 The Scheme seeks to adopt a sequential approach with focus on rehabilitation of children working in hazardous occupations & processes in the first instance.
 Under the Scheme, survey of child labor engaged in hazardous occupations & processes has been conducted.
 The identified children are to be withdrawn from these occupations & processes and then put into special schools in order to enable them to be mainstreamed into formal schooling system.
 Project Societies at the district level are fully funded for opening up of special schools/Rehabilitation Centers for the rehabilitation of child labor.
 The special schools/Rehabilitation Centers provide:
1. Non-formal/bridge education
2. Skilled/vocational training
3. Mid Day Meal
4. Stipend @ Rs.150/- per child per month.
5. Health care facilities through a doctor appointed for a group of 20 schools.
The project societies are required to conduct survey to identify children working in hazardous occupations and processes. These children will then form the target group for the project society. Of the children identified those in the age group 5-8 years will have to be mainstreamed directly to formal educational system through the SSA. Working children in the age group of 9- 14 years will have to be rehabilitated through NCLP schools established by the Project Society.
The Right to Education:
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act or Right to Education Act (RTE), is an Act of the Parliament of India enacted on 4 August 2009, which describes the modalities of the importance of free and compulsory education for children between 6 and 14 in India under Article 21a of the Indian Constitution. India became one of 135 countries to make education a fundamental right of every child when the act came into force on 1 April 2010.
The Act makes education a fundamental right of every child between the ages of 6 and 14 and specifies minimum norms in elementary schools. It requires all private schools to reserve 25% of seats to children (to be reimbursed by the state as part of the public-private partnership plan). Kids are admitted in to private schools based on caste based reservations. It also prohibits all unrecognized schools from practice, and makes provisions for no donation or capitation fees and no interview of the child or parent for admission. The Act also provides that no child shall be held back, expelled, or required to pass a board examination until the completion of elementary education. There is also a provision for special training of school drop-outs to bring them up to par with students of the same age.
The RTE act requires surveys that will monitor all neighborhoods, identify children requiring education, and set up facilities for providing it. The World Bank education specialist for India, Sam Carlson, has observed: “The RTE Act is the first legislation in the world that puts the responsibility of ensuring enrolment, attendance and completion on the Government. It is the parents’ responsibility to send the children to schools in the US and other countries.”
The Right to Education of persons with disabilities until 18 years of age is laid down under a separate legislation- the Persons with Disabilities Act. A number of other provisions regarding improvement of school infrastructure, teacher-student ratio and faculty are made in the Act.
Although the objectives are noble and the effect it will have on child labor immense, states are grappling with its implementation. The Act was challenged by minority institutions in the Supreme Court and on May 7th 2014, the Supreme Court in a landmark judgment exempted Minority Institutions form the operation of the act.
Conclusion:
The problem of child labor is essentially born out of a number of fundamental issues related to poverty. Social Protection floors combined with the right to education will make a difference, but it is a long haul. India’s approach is right, but if effort in all its dimensions – motivation, awareness, enforcement and social protection is not adopted, it will fail. At the top of the value chain is the complete elimination of poverty.
“We are moving in the right direction but progress is still too slow. If we are serious about ending the scourge of child labor in the foreseeable future, we need a substantial stepping-up of efforts at all levels. There are 168 million good reasons to do so.” Guy Ryder, ILO Director-General
Reference and inputs:
Websites:
www.ilo.org
www.en.wikipedia.org
www.labour.nic.in
www.cry.org
