Shyamal Majumdar: Child labour ban: If wishes were horses...

HUMAN FACTOR

As long as the little worker is a mouth less for poor families to feed, the law will continue to be flouted.

The NGOs are euphoric and the government hasn't stopped congratulating itself for this wonderful piece of legislation. Last week, India, home to the world's largest number of child labourers (the official estimate is 11 million though the actual figure is over 75 million), banned children from working as domestic servants or at hotels, tea shops, restaurants and resorts.

These sectors now have roughly 60 days to sack their little labourers. The latest ban is merely an extension of the existing law "" the Child Labour Act, 1986 "" under which children are prohibited from working in hazardous industrial units.

Will the ban work? The answer is quite obvious, going by the track record so far. "If wishes were horses, law could change men's minds," says a former official in the Maharashtra labour department. He gives three documents that give a graphic description of how the law is flouted openly even 20 years after it came into effect.

The first is an ANI report on the stone quarries in West Bengal's Siliguri district, where hundreds of children, driven by hunger and poverty, are forced to engage in stone crushing activity. "Children spend eight hours a day by the riverside, fishing out stones and breaking them into gravel with hand tools twice the size of their tiny hands. Most of these kids are the crucial breadwinners for their even younger siblings," the report says.

The constant hammering means blistered hands and feet and the prolonged exposure to fine limestone dust leaves many with life-threatening respiratory disorders. Employed through contract companies, they lose a sizeable chunk of their money to middlemen, ultimately earning a meagre amount which is not enough to buy them even one complete meal.

The second example is of a slaughter house at Parbhani, a small town in Maharashtra. Over half of the workers at the slaughter house were children aged between six and 14. They had to cut, skin and break the bones of cattle. Some had to even blow into the spleen of the dead cattle. They were rescued and put into coaching classes not by the law-enforcing authorities but by SETU, an NGO, and Unicef.

A report brought out by the two organisations quotes the children as saying that they had to force the animals down with their tiny hands and then cut it. One of the children, aged 10, said it was horrible to hear the screams of the animals.

It was a commendable job by SETU and Unicef. But it's obvious that there are many more such slaughter houses in the country that are still outside the reach of such voluntary organisations.

The third example is a study by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions on child labour in Sivakasi. The children, who are paid Rs 15-18 a day, are used to dye outer paper, make small firecrackers, roll the powder and pack the final product. What makes identification difficult is that they work in unlicensed fireworks factories working under sub-contracts. Managers employing children either register their age as being above 14 or do not register them at all. Another NGO, Development Action for Women in Need, highlights the hazards of dealing with poisonous materials such as sulphur, salt peter, barium and strontium nitrates, and says it has noted underdevelopment of the uterus in young girls who squat for long hours making paper rolls.

These three heart-rending examples of open violation of the law are reasons why there is so much of cynicism about the effectiveness of the latest ban. Since 1933, there have been laws in force that ban or regulate child labour, including Article 24 of the Constitution that expressly prohibits it. None of these provisions has been effective in curtailing its proliferation. Lakhs of children still continue to work in firecracker and matchstick factories or are involved in carpet weaving, embroidery or stitching footballs in wretched conditions.

That legislation can have only a negligible impact is apparent from the fact that child labour is nothing but a by-product of grinding poverty. These children are holding out a slim lifeline to impoverished families, or are just trying to keep themselves from starvation. For example, in about 60 per cent of the Sivakasi households with working children, two-thirds of the total income is contributed by children. In any case, the working child is a mouth less for families in penury to feed.

The dilemma is similar to that of the ban on dance bars in Mumbai on the grounds that it would put an end to the exploitation of these women. What happened to those 70,000-odd bar girls after the ban? Some became prostitutes, some went back home only to be ostracised and some committed suicide.

As long as alternative sources of income are not found for families whose children work in the banned sectors, the law would continue be flouted.