This one's for children

Be your own ministers in your own parliament, an NGO tells juveniles

For an NGO that boasts of hefty foreign funding

(Rs 130 crore), Vision India has adopted a novel method of empowering its members. Dedicated to preventing and rescuing children from labour, the NGO has introduced a format whereby its members (the children) keep a check on its activities and play auditor to the organisation.

Vision India has formed a parliament "" complete with a cabinet and prime minister "" of elected representatives from its 30 children's clubs that function from 160 locations spread over the country. This parliament goes through all the plans and projects of the NGO and gives its approval, thus empowering the children. Under the format, the children are involved in project planning right from stakeholder analysis to selecting beneficiaries for some of its programmes.

According to Jayakumar Christian, national director, Vision India, these members are children who have been rescued from child labour or abject poverty. Called MPs, these children participate in child protection committee meetings held at the village level and advocate child rights at various levels. Exposure visits are organised to train the members in children's rights and preventing child abuse. The children are also involved in identifying child labourers and bonded children.

Jayakumar believes that a government notification or a ban alone cannot eradicate child labour. He suggests a three-pronged strategy (which he recently also conveyed to the labour ministry) along with the ban on child labour.

Strategy number one, he says, is to send children to school. "But children will not go to school if the parents cannot afford it," he says. So option two stems from that: empower the parents, help them economically. Supplementing these is the third step: a parliament for them, which the NGO is promoting in each of its locations.

The NGO's future agenda is to make the project accountable to children, and mainstreaming of children's participation in panchayat structures. As for the other two strategies of sending children to schools and empowering parents, Jayakumar says, "Across the country, there are 15 standalone programmes and projects which address child labour, and there are about four to five bridge schools for each of them. Additionally, across our 120 development programmes in the country, there are bridge schools to ensure that children have access to education."

Warns Dr Tim Costello, CEO, World Vision Australia: "Child labour in India is not just a local problem. We in Australia believe in the global community and when the Indian finance minister comes to Australia for G-20, our people would definitely like to know about the condition of children there." P Chidambaram better be prepared.