The Hindu Business Line : Now, give them education

Everyone will agree that children need to spend more time in school, preparing themselves for the future, than slogging it out in roadside eateries and homes as domestic helps or, worse, in hazardous industries. Seen from this perspective, the Centre should be commended for extending — from October 10 — the scope of the 1986 Act on Child Labour Protection (Prohibition And Regulation) thereby taking the national effort to nurture the country future human capital on to a higher, more comprehensive plane.

In fact, what New Delhi has done is part of a larger, worldwide effort, spearheaded by the ILO's International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) and codified in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of the UN. Under the latter, a pledge has been taken under the auspices of the UN "to make it possible — by 2015 — for every child in the world to complete primary schooling, to cut child mortality rates by two-thirds and...to not only halt but send into retreat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases." This is a laudable goal, and hopefully will be achieved by the stipulated time-frame. The important point is that it means a lot of hard work backed by sizable resources, which should put New Delhi's effort to protect children in proper perspective. If nothing else, the magnitude of the problem is itself daunting with government figures (1995) indicating that there are about 77 million child-labourers active in the economy, the international Human Rights Watch putting the figure (1996) at anywhere between 60 million and 115 million, thereby suggesting that not only is the size of the problem extremely big but that there is also some uncertainly about its extent, which makes the job of taking remedial action even more problematic. But what is beyond controversy is that India has the largest number of working children in the world and that their contribution to the Gross National Product is impressive (one estimate puts it as high as 20 per cent).

What this means is that the current effort to end the exploitation of children must be accompanied by adequate rehabilitation measures, the focal point of which should clearly be the imparting of useful education to the young, relocated minds. Since more than 80 per cent of rural child-labourers work in cultivation and agriculture generally, rural education facilities should be one important area for the authorities to focus on in the aftermath of the ban on child-labour. Indeed, it can be argued that the sequencing should have been the other way round, with the classrooms being already built to receive the `unemployed' children. But this has not been the case which, among other things, suggests that the child-labour prevention policy of the Government needs to be worked out much more thoroughly than has been the case till now.

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