The five-hour drive from Coimbatore to Munnar through the picturesque ghats could have been a visual treat but for the brief meeting with Mithailal Tikri at a tea shop, just half an hour into the journey.
Ten-year-old Mithai is mopping the floors at the shop and runs to take the order as the owner barks at him. His torn trousers and dirty shirt are perhaps good enough reasons why the tea shop is empty even though the tourist season is just about peaking. After all, health-conscious tourists would barely like to be served tea by "unhygienic" child labour.
Mithai says his father, who worked as a labourer in a towel factory in Coimbatore, died two years ago. His mother works as a cook in a nearby dhaba, and Mithai doesn't mind the frequent twisting of his ears by the owner of the tea shop because of the free meals and Rs 10-a-day salary. The bonus: he is allowed to go to his mother after 8 pm.
Even as he serves us tea, the little labourer requests us not to mention all this when we meet the owner for settling the bill. Thus, Mithai is a slight variation of his original name.
Mithai is just an example of how the stigma of child labour persists in India even one-and-a-half years after the government banned the hiring of children as domestic helps or for employing in restaurants and eateries. The ban was merely an extension of the Child Labour Act, 1986, under which children are prohibited from working in hazardous industrial units.
India, home to the world's largest number of child labourers (the official estimate is 11 million though the actual figure is estimated at over 100 million), is indeed keeping its dubious record intact
