Expert Talk: Loopholes in child labour law

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Keywords: Expert Talk, Child Labour

November 14 is Children’s Day, but for 23 million children in the country it will be yet another day of hard labour. Is the law simply making India’s child labourers invisible? CNN-IBN finds out in a special series Child, Interrupted!

CNN-IBN brings in an elite panel of experts on child labour laws to analyse human rights violations in India.

By Swami Agnivesh

All forms of child labour stood banned the day we adopted our Constitution. The Constitution guarantees education for all children up to the age of 14. This should leave no room for exploitation of a child as a labour.

The Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act, 1986, bans child labour in what it defines as hazardous industries. This is a flexible list that the Government keeps revising from time to time.

The 1986 Act while prohibiting bonded child labour from hazardous industries also allows it to thrive in some other form. A child working in a factory is considered hazardous and is not allowed. But if the child is part of the family labour, he’s allowed to work. Hence, the 1986 Act has a large scope of exploitation of children if they could be brought under the family-child labour phenomena.

We social activists from day one have been crying hoarse about this act and we still have a feeling it was more about legitimising child labour rather than prohibiting it.

At that time domestic child labour and hotel/dhabas were not under hazardous category. It is only now that the Government woke up and decided to add these two categories. This is nothing radical, nothing new.

All this is a futile exercise under the old discredited act of 1986, which we have been accusing of legitimising child labour in our country rather than prohibiting it. We are skeptic about the intention of the Government. If they really mean business, they must ban all forms of child labour. For them to say that this is hazardous and this is non-hazardous is not done.

We feel that any form of work, any type of labour by a child which puts into danger his or her growth as a child, denial of education, denial of all other facilities and opportunities is hazardous for the growth of the child and therefore it should be banned completely.

The Government lacks political will to take a stand on this issue. If their intention was to ban child labour, they should understand that no child in the world would like to work for eight-16 hours in a day and not go to school and not play like a child.

So, if a child is working even for six-eight hours, there is definitely an element of force and coercion. We have to take it for granted that there is an element of force and the child is not simply a child labour but a forced child labour and therefore bonded child labour.

You can easily guess that if children are not in school and they belong to the school going age say up to the age of 14, then obviously they’re all being exploited in somebody’s home or somebody’s dhaba/factory/farm. It can’t be that children not in school are picnicking somewhere! They’re all being exploited. So, the most important thing for the Government to do is to provide equal opportunities of education to all children irrespective of their economic status, caste, creed, religion or gender.