Child Labour: Are we really doing enough?

KARMA BHUTIA
With the ever increasing demand and supply of consumer goods and the economy of India escalating to new heights, it is proving extremely difficult to end Child Labour in our country. Although, the Constitution has policies safeguarding the rights of children the question is – are these bearing any fruit?
Every now and then we get to hear fortuitous news about apprehending illegal child traffickers only but what about the fate of those children who slog from dusk till dawn in tea stalls, some shrouded in factories, or concealed in brothels. One can examine the meretricious role of the character ‘Millimetre’ from the film Three Idiots and assume the depth of incision of child labour in the Indian society.
While many are willing to accept that the problem of child labour exists, very few people are willing to accept responsibility for the problem. Indian children are most exploited in volume as per the data released by CRY [Child Relief and you] and are often forced to work out of necessity, most employed children come from poverty stricken families generally from rural communities. The family’s poverty forces children into the work place. A father at a construction site in Sikkim whose children went to school remarked "What is the point of my children going to school when they won't get any suitable job that would be enough to provide the daily bread."
Although poverty is the main catalyst of the child labour problem, it is not, however, the only cause. Family debt is also a contributing factor. Often family debts will be passed on to the next generation forcing young children into bonded labour. As the CRY organization states, a case study in Sivakashi match factories found that even the child in the womb is pledged to the factory, and consumption and maternity loans are obtained on the undertaking that when the child is born, girl or boy, would work for the factory. Bonded children have no way of ending the cycle of debt created by their parents; their labour seems only to incur more debts as the master controls their fate. This cycle perpetuates with the children being bonded to their masters to repay even eight-generation old debts.
Nestle and Hershey's are both multinational giants synonymous for making chocolate bars and hot drinks products. It is learned that they were found flouting child labour norms, the raw material: like the cocoa beans which is imported from African countries such as Ghana and Ivory Coast which account for75% of cocoa production in the world, which is used to make chocolate products were actually prepared for export to manufacturing countries through hard labour by young kids. Most of the children were between12 to 16, children as young as seven have also been caught on camera working for these multinational companies.
To protect the pods from insects children aged as young as 12 have to spray the pods without protective equipment exposing themselves to hazardous chemicals.
Moreover, the question is how much are we informed and adhering to the fact of problems faced by children working as labour in Sikkim? There are hundreds of examples prevalent, just about every other chai shop employs early teenagers working as waiters, helpers, cooks etc under hazardous conditions. Young Adivasi girls and boys from the neighbouring state of West-Bengal are illegally trafficked every year across the state’s border. They are found serving alcohol in restaurants by the crack of dawn and plodding at work till late night. Apart from the drudgery the amoral insult the owner unleashes leaves a lot to ponder about on our social behavior and structure. Alien to our climate their hands swell like inflated balloons during winter because of the exposure to the cold water while doing the dishes. Yet we are never thankful and just remunerate them with meagre amounts enough for just a hand-to- mouth existence. The surplus value and the comfort they provide us with their hard labour must be paid to them to bring things at par.
There were reports that said that young school going kids in rural Sikkim are engaged as labourers at road construction sites during their winter vacations where they are susceptible to hazardous gases such nitrous and nitrogen oxide emitted due to burning of bitumen for carpeting.
RK Mishra, who studied child labour in the sari industry of Varanasi, once said that the child labourers were like caged-birds - condemned from their very birth to be captive workers. For now, the world must wait anxiously for these caged birds to be set free.
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