Sweet child o' mine

The rescue of child labourers from the zari factories in Delhi last month was nothing but a publicity stunt of the labour department, with neither rehabilitation programme nor immediate relief for the children

Sandeep Yadav Delhi

Eight-year-old Nizam from Sitamarhi, Bihar, has an impressive resume. At  this young age he has an already accumulated eleven months of work experience . Recently rescued from a zari factory in Jafarabad, Delhi, Nizam behaves far more mature than his eight years. The story is no different for Muturja, Rakesh, Ladoo and the others. They are the part of the growing team of a hundred million child labour in the country who have missed out on their childhood. "Ghar jakar kuch apna kaam shuru karunga" (I will return home and start my own work) dreamt Nizam poignantly.

Child labour has been prohibited in few hazardous industries and of the total population of 100 million child labour employed in India only about two million are working in these industries. The rest of the pool (98 million children) is working in the non-prohibited industries and fall outside the purview of labour laws.  In the case of 425 children rescued by the labour department, government of Delhi on November 21, 2005, the lacunae in the labour laws and lack of rehabilitation programme came into sharp focus.

After the rescue operation, these children in the 8-14 age group from about 150 zari factories in the Jafarabad area of Delhi were put up at the August Kranti Bhawan under the control and supervision of an NGO, Pratham Delhi Education Initiative. The labour department had relied on this NGO because they claimed to have organisational presence in Bihar, where most of the rescued children were from. The NGO had offered to take the children to Patna and identify the parents. According to plan, the labour department left the children in the charge of Pratham in Delhi.  The project in-charge in Pratham reportedly requested more funds to get these children back to their homes but the NGO management refused and instead sacked the man. The labour officials however were not concerned with the internal state of affairs at  Pratham and demurred from taking further responsibility. Narendra Kumar, secretary, labour and employment, government of Delhi said that the labour department could not have kept the children. "We cannot keep them with us as per the Juvenile Justice Act 2002. A Child Welfare Committee (CWC) has been constituted in every state and we have to produce them before it. It is the duty of the CWC to restore the children to their parents," explained Kumar.

The labour department did not scrutinise the facilities or the funds at the disposal of the NGO Pratham. Forget medical care, basic sanitation facilities were absent. Due to the unhygienic atmosphere and lack of basic amenities many children fell sick and remained unattended for days. The NGO then passed on its responsibility to the CWC who transferred these children to their welfare homes. Five days later these children were shifted in haste and lodged in five different overcrowded juvenile homes, under the patronage of CWC. Hardnews visited one such child home in Lajpat Nagar. It was overcrowded. The dormitories were dingy and unhealthy. The children were mixed with the already-resident ones, and some were in a room that was for children undergoing drug de-addiction. A ten-year-old Assamese child revealed that he was into intravenous drug use before he came there. The guardians of the rescued children came as soon as they were informed, to collect their wards from these shelter homes, ending the saga of the rescue mission.

The names of the employers of these children have been withheld by the labour department. Kumar revealed that the majority of them ran away and the identification process is on for the absconders. The case has been filed against those who have been identified under the Factories Act 1948. The labour secretary elaborated upon his plan of deploying four labour inspectors in the suspected industrial areas to apprehend the employers instead of the children. "This would save the children harassment," hoped Kumar. When queried about the lack of rehabilitation programme for the children, Kumar said that any such programmes would encourage more influx of child labour as the parents would consider it their right to have their children be taken care of by the government.

Advocate and member of Social Jurist, a civil rights group, Ashok Agarwal is critical of the state's attitude towards child labour prevention. "Child labour should not be the subject of the labour department at all because it does not have any rehabilitation programme. It should come under the preview of the human resource ministry which should look after the rehabilitation and education of these children," argued Agarwal. This reasoning is sound given that the labour department is through with the responsibility of the rescued children once they are sent to the rescue homes or to their parents. These very children rescued from the zari factories would have probably started working somewhere else by now.

The Report on the National Commission on Labour (2002) has noted that the child labour in India is largely illiterate. Whatever the correlation between education, literacy and child labour, the fact is that child labour keeps children out of schools and contributes to low literacy rates, especially among girl children.  Some western democracies deem any child out of school as child labour. Andhra Pradesh too recently tabled a bill to this effect. Advocate Agarwal believes that making schools child-friendly and attractive would contribute to the remedy and at least "keeping these children in schools would be keeping them away from the harassment and torture in the form of child labour".

The supreme court issued notice on December 12, 2005, to the centre on a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Ashok Agarwal seeking enforcement of the right to education of every child in the age group of 6 to 14 by abolishing child labour in all its forms. Ashok Agarwal argued that Article 21-A of the constitution mandates compulsory education for every child in the age group 6-14 years. Even after 57 years of independence, out of 200 million children of this age group, nearly 100 million were estimated to be out of school and engaged in labour. It was also argued that the failure of the existing laws on child labour to completely prohibit such labour was causing continuous violation of all human rights of children. The petitioners sought a declaration that child labour in any form up to 14 years was unconstitutional.

Activists are well-aware that a blanket legal ban by itself cannot work.  Kumar believes that there is no solution to the child labour unless we attack at the root cause which is rural infrastructure. "Unless the state governments improve their health, education and employment opportunities the solution to the problem of child labour cannot be envisaged," he asserted.

Agreed, for the majority of child labour is from the villages and small towns. But what about the existence of child labour in the agricultural sector? This sector alone employs more than three-fourth of the child labourers in the country. Millions of children are involved in livestock-rearing, forestry, fisheries and crop plantation and harvesting in rural India. However this labour falls outside the formal sector and the industry and hence free of labour law constraints. And there are the "nowhere children", who are not captured in school records or labour department records. They are not in school and not at the workplace, but are hidden in homes, in homesteads and tucked under flyovers. What about them? The Cuban President Fidel Castro can proudly claim, "Let me know whether there is a single, just one, homeless child in Cuba." India has a long way to go before its head of state could claim anything near it.