Children at Work

Editorial:
Sunday was World Day Against Child Labour. An issue which was quite ‘popular’ in the NGO circuit and its circus of rallies and placards appears to have fallen off the priority list of public engagement. After the high of [appearing] to save under 14 years olds even from the servitude of domestic help, the law remains largely ignored, save the extremely rare occasion when some ‘rescues’ are made. The only real change which has transpired at the ground level is that all those ‘lost’ notices of domestic servants who have gone missing record their age as 14, conveniently matured to save the masters and mistresses from attracting legal action. What this makes amply clear is that awareness on child labour laws is universal. Unfortunately, so is the disregard for these rules, a disregard born not from an evil design to exploit children but from a nonchalance nurtured by a disinterest among the concerned agencies to enforce the rules and rescue children.
To get a clearer idea on how these ‘concerned’ agencies have measured up to their new tasks, one needs to be reminded of how the National Child Labour Project [NCLP] was implemented in Sikkim. NCLP, a Central Plan Scheme, was aimed, on paper, to rehabilitated children withdrawn from now illegal employment. This was part of the 11th Plan and in March 2007, the Union Ministry for Labour & Employment asked the State Government here to suggest names of “reputed and independent” agencies in Sikkim to carry out an “intensive” child labour survey. The State was to do so by 15 May 2007. Admittedly, it is not easy to find “reputed and independent” agencies for any task in Sikkim and even by January 2008, the State had not furnished any names. What it did do in Jan 2008, however, is pass on the job to carry out a child labour survey to the Department of Economics, Statistics, Monitoring & Evaluation. After spending Rs. 33 lakh on the survey, DESME, in February 2009, submitted the result of the survey – as per its enumerators, there were 213 children employed as domestic servants in Sikkim!  Even this figure was padded up with inclusion of some 20 and one 58 year old domestic help. This was obviously an offensively irresponsible exercise, especially since the Census 2001 had recorded 16,517 instances of child labour in Sikkim. This disinterest underlines what is wrong with the effort to save minors from illegal servitude, no one is taking it seriously.
Anyone harbouring mistaken notions of child labour not being a ‘serious enough’ issue in Sikkim needs to be reminded that it was here that a pre-teen domestic servant was admitted in hospital with arthritis brought on from being made to carry excessively heavy loads. Young domestic servants have committed suicide in homes here and there has been at least one incident of the rape of a minor domestic servant in her home of employ in recent years. Even without these references, it should be the responsibility of not only the Department tasked with enforcing the new laws and the society at large to rescue more children from their service in homes. Too many under-14 year olds are growing into adulthood scarred because no one did enough to save them even though law required them to be rescued and just because a majority of them might be from outside the State should not be reason enough to blindside the issue. Working in homes here should not be justified any more on the ground that the children receive a better life here, because, with the Right to Education laws, no child should be subjected to repetitive mind-numbing tasks, menial errands, isolation or denigration which service in alien families means. Admittedly, there are millions of other children elsewhere in the world engaged in much more hazardous work, but that is elsewhere in the world, the challenge in Sikkim should be to allow children under-14 years of age to get a fair chance at being children. What is worrying is that even the token nods in this direction are not being made any more.