No country for children

In a position paper on Child Labour, the NGO, Save the Children, points to its nature as “invisible labour”. Unlike children slogging away in the sweat shops of nineteenth century London immortalised by Charles Dickens, child labour in India remains below the radar and estimates therefore tend to vary wildly.

The government’s calculations are modest: 12 million, the ILO pitches it at 44 million and “civil society” puts the number of children not at school or play at 70-80 million.

Are all forms of labour engaged in by children to be condemned? Children below the age of eighteen or even fifteen work in factories in both hazardous and non-hazardous jobs; the distinction is both arbitrary and false because one would think all forms of work in assembly lines or in bidi shops or cutting sugarcane to be hazardous to the child insofar as they prevent his/her education and spell the end of innocence.

But one would think helping parents with housework or even, as was the case with artisanal families, sons inheriting the skills of the father by first watching, then emulating (a process that psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar found indispensable for the bonds between fathers and sons in traditional families) to be an essential socialisation of the boy-child.

In a society with pretensions to modernity, even that form of child labour would be condemned if it impinged on education and what the NGO calls “holistic development.”

The NGO also draws a distinction based on age so that all children below the age of 15 years should be excluded by legislation from labour of any kind, while those in the 15-18 range should have legal protection.

By now the image of children working at carpet weaving in Bhadohi or in bidi factories is the stuff of legend and legislation to prevent such practices has been enacted. The Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act 1986 was meant to protect children from exploitation in various arenas, but has been found wanting.

The cane cutters

One such lacuna is the use of children on sugarcane farms; sugarcane cutting is both hazardous and tedious. It is almost shocking at first glance to learn of the practice of employing children of migrants for sugarcane cutting in Western Maharashtra, the area of rich agriculture, the hub of irrigation and modern practices, the crucible of political leadership, the site of the dominant Maratha kulaks who have held sway in the State for well over five decades. In a study titled, “Child Rights: Situation Analysis” undertaken by the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics for Save the Children, Debasish Nandy paints a dismal picture of child exploitation on sugarcane farms, in a part of the State one would have expected to have switched to mechanisation long ago.

There are several aspects of the study that are revealing as there are the obvious. One hardly needs a survey to be told that children of migrant families forsake education, have no rights whatsoever and are subject to the caprices of powerful landowners.

Nandy points to the absence of health protection: In Maharashtra, unlike Gujarat, migrant labourers are not provided with health cards, a “gross institutional reluctance (sic) in providing basic health facilities.”

Needless to say, adolescent girls suffer most from the gross lapses, especially from a poor supply of medicines to counter nutritional anaemia. Abuses of various sorts are also rampant.

Signposts of distress

There are a few pointers that underline India’s lopsided development and the State’s s “spatial” inequalities. First, migration is not just a rural-to-urban phenomenon.

The skewed growth divides the rural economy, too. Most migrants, small landowners or landless labourers gravitate towards the rich sugarcane farms of western Maharashtra from the poorer and depressed districts to its east. Migration is seasonal or circular, with the same families returning in season to cut the harvest.

Most migrant families are ‘forced’ to migrate because of indebtedness; most are socially marginal, tribals and dalits. Of the 638 households surveyed, 384 (60 per cent) moved to repay the debts incurred from their native village mukadam , loans for both farm and consumption needs.

Given the flawed pattern of farm growth in the State and water resources concentrated in the sugar belt in the western parts, the high rate of suicides in the eastern region such as Vidarbha (which is also the site of Naxal violence), and now, as the study shows, indebtedness --- what is patent is the fragility of more than 60 per cent of the population that still lives off agriculture.

Who pays? Who cares?

Children then pay the collateral damage of this warped growth. The intensity of the deprivation borne by them can be measured by the severity of the work, with teenage boys in the main cutting the cane, a dangerous job for anyone, and the fact that most of the surveyed migrant families are scheduled castes or various categories of tribes.

In short, they are the lowest in the rural pecking order — and there is a paucity of laws to ensure some measure of protection for the under-aged.

Over the years, India has created what on paper at least is a robust institutional capacity to protect and perhaps eliminate child labour. Constitutional provisions are considerable and yet they suffer from some drawbacks.

One is the lack of clarity on the definition of a child and the universe of child labour. Most of the Acts, including the RTE, consider 6-14 years as the defining age for child rights. But Nandy’s study shows the majority of children employed in cutting cane to be teenagers, between 15 and 18 years.

These children fall outside the purview of almost all child protection laws and the RTE.

Read this with the more pernicious shortcoming that afflicts the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act (CLPRA) of 1986: Its ambit does not count farm labour or agro-based activities as prohibited sites for child labour.

In the event, teenagers on the sugarcane farms of western Maharashtra have to suffer triple forfeits: first the penalty for being born into the lowest social strata, then the exclusions from the benison of the RTE and the CLPRA on account of a discriminatory yardstick.

India may be shining but it’s no country for children.

(blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

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