Hope and Despair

4:43 AM 2nd December,07 - I couldn't really think of anything better to write about. I haven't even started my packing, and I am supposed to leave within the next 3 hours, for a month of winter vacation. With a little bit of reflection and research, this is what I came up with...

Child Labor in India is the issue I wish to focus upon. This issue concerns me because even today, a shocking 14% of Indian boys in the age group 5-14 are involved in child labor. The figure being even higher for girls. Millions of childhoods are wasted away in dull subsistence-level labor that produces minimal economic value, draining away their creativity and learning potential of future workers.

The Govt. has had Child labor laws since 1986. But that has not substantially addressed the core of the problem. Policy framers must recognise the fact that poverty is the primary cause of this problem. Statistics reveal a clear parallel between declining poverty and reduced child labor. Also, the problem is more common in areas where parents have limited access to affordable schooling. Therefore, I infer that poverty and education can never go together. This is a curse in itself because it is tricky to address both problems simultaneously. More often than not, the child’s economic contribution to the family outweighs the need to invest in his future, even in the presence of facilities like inexpensive schooling.

While the govt. intends to eliminate child labor, by banning work in hazardous establishments, factories, workshops etc, we must examine whether these laws eliminate the need for the child to work or simply move them into less desirable or even more dangerous activities. One stumbling block where most of the current policies fail is that 90% of all working children are engaged in their own rural family work, and just 0.8% are involved in factory/industry work.

My policy will address simultaneously the problems of poverty and education. I plan to employ micro credit as my principal tool, and the village would be the locus of my action. Most of the children who are involved in family businesses invariably pick up a skill or two. These skills, rather than manual work can be utilized for earning money. It would be interesting to examine, whether through microcredit, one can pull them up from the poverty trap and motivate them to study. I am fascinated by the works of Nobel Laureate Prof. Yunus in his Grameen Bank experiment at Bangladesh If it succeeds there, why not here? Considering the scale that child labor is present in our country, I have a couple of alternatives.

I would suggest yet another strategy that operates the way Amway works. Education will be promised to a child if he promises to find ways to educate two more children when he is good enough to support himself. This method, as impractical as it may seem, has worked wonderfully well for Jeroo Billimoria, founder of Childline.

In the medium term, I would like to examine how the corporates can be motivated in this area under their corporate social responsibility(CSR).Through their wide network and business acumen, we can work out how the parents of those child labor can be drafted through some innovative ways. I don’t know at the moment what this could turn out to be, but if we do some novel experiments, the problem can be addressed.

In the long term, we have to educate our people for which there is no short-cut. We can organize sensitization programs for the ordinary men and women and if we can streamline our civic engagement, perhaps enough of social capital can be built up and the child labor will be a thing of the past.

Peace be with you...

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