Lately, there’s been much hot air over the Child Labour (Prohibition & Regulation) Act 1986, with a pointless controversy erupting over a recently amended version of the Act passed by both houses of Parliament.

The Child Labour Act is one of the least effective pieces of legislation in India, one that has hardly been useful in containing, let alone eliminating, child labour. The prosecution and conviction rate is laughably low and most of its key provisions have for long remained unenforceable.

The Act deserves to be scrapped and, along with it, the ill-equipped labour ministry must be divested of the responsibility to eliminate child labour in India.

The real picture Three decades have passed since the Act was passed and it is now time to recognise that millions of young people continue to work, primarily because the state refuses to fix a moribund and dysfunctional educational system. In this regard, are telling.

According to the ministry of human resources development, in 2014, close to 130 million children were estimated to have enrolled in primary schoolwhile just about half that, or 65.7 million joined upper primary.

The number of pupils enrolled in all the secondary schools for that year added up to a mere 36.9 million. Compare that to the US which, with around a quarter of India’s population, has slightly over 40 per cent of that number, or nearly 15 million children, in high school.

Instead of taking refuge in percentages, let’s take a look at actual numbers. To state that only 36.3 per cent of students dropped out by class eight in 2013-14, as the MHRD does, is no comfort when, in absolute numbers, it is much more than the higher percentages of previous decades.

Successive reports from the NGO, Pratham, have revealed how abysmal the situation is on the ground. Almost half of all children in Class 5 across India barely have the language and computational attainments that they should have acquired by the end of Class 2.

For all the hype built around Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, RTE and Skill-India, the statistics incontrovertibly establish that millions of India’s children continue to exit education far too soon every year, directly adding to the ranks of working children. This is especially true of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal with high school dropout rates at primary and upper-primary levels.

Going by MHRD figures, the number of dropouts by Class 8 stood at a little over 36.3 million in 2013-14, providing better-off States such as Maharashtra and those in the south with an inexhaustible supply of cheap manual labour and little else.

We talk blithely of India’s demographic dividend. The fact is, we are heading for a major crisis with millions of dropouts swelling the ranks of the under-educated, under-skilled and highly exploitable.

Time to invest China has been investing nearly 2 per cent of its GDP in education to great effect. To match this, India should commit at least between 10 to15 per cent of its GDP to educate the young; instead, it has been investing less than 5 per cent. The results is we have a child labour problem of gargantuan proportions.

Since economic liberalisation in 1991, India has been generating and squandering resources required to replicate China’s dramatic success in education and poverty reduction. We must now take charge of our children and put them through a decade-long cycle of compulsory, high quality education.

The poorest Indian is discerning enough to see the value of good education and has the perspicacity to see the low value of what is on offer. In such circumstances, putting children to work appears more meaningful than sending them to government schools with absentee teachers and rotten classrooms.

We must accept that only accessible and affordable quality education can do the job. It is important, therefore, to make education a central feature of all poverty alleviation programmes. The need for that is self-evident.

There is no country in the world where sustained high quality mass education has not led to dramatic improvements in the life and well-being of its people and yes, the elimination of child labour as well.

Formerly in charge of child labour elimination in government, the writer is visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru

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