India's child workers appeal for lost childhood

Anti-Child Labour Day

Dozens of Indian children working as rag-pickers and street hawkers appealed to the government on Saturday to enforce a ban on child labour.
Though the law prohibits children under 14 from working in factories, mines and other hazardous industries, the government estimates there are about 17 million child labourers, the majority working on farms or making carpets and firecrackers.
“We want the government to fully implement the ban on child labour and provide education so that children can get back their childhood,” said Subhash, a rag-picker who read out a charter of demands on the eve of Anti-Child Labour Day.
“People between 14 and 18 should also be included because they are easy prey to exploitation and injustice.”

Human rights groups estimate up to 115 million children — roughly twice the entire population of the United Kingdom — work for a living. Millions more work part-time.
Most of them work under dangerous conditions in the firecracker, hand-rolled cigarette and glass industries, where they are exposed to hazardous chemicals and open furnaces spewing toxic gases.
Children in the carpet industry spend long hours bent over looms and end up with poor eyesight and severe stiffness in the fingers. Rag-pickers face other problems such as harassment at the hands of police.
The children work 12- to 15-hour days in dimly lit cramped rooms, sometimes for less than three rupees a day, a pittance even by the standards of a country where millions live on about a dollar a day.

Nimble fingers

Hazra, a 12-year-old rag-picker from Delhi, said rag-pickers were often beaten by police who confiscated whatever they managed to scrape out of garbage dumps and accused them of being thieves.
“They only return our things after we pay them,” said the pony-tailed girl dressed in red traditional Indian trousers and a shirt.
“I just want to say we're just rag-pickers, not thieves. We're accused of being thieves when we've done nothing.”
Grinding poverty forces most children to drop out of school and start working young, sometimes pounding rocks as young as five or stitching footballs for the huge sporting goods industry.
The carpet industry uses a lot of children because of a myth that their nimble fingers are necessary to weave the intricate designs of the carpets.
Many are forced to work as near bonded labour because their families are saddled with loans that they are unable to repay on their meagre earnings.

Sadhna, a rag picker from Delhi, quit school to begin sifting through garbage in the city to help her parents repay a 1,000 rupee loan for her sister's medical treatment.
“Obviously, we want to be in school like all other children,” said the teenager shyly. “But we have to help our families.”
Authorities have rescued more than 400 children working in the gold embroidery business in Bombay in the past few weeks, but activists say unless the government ensured their education there was no stopping the children from going back to work.
“If children are not integrated in the education system, they return to the same employer or another once they're sent home,” Ashok Agarwal, a lawyer, told reporters.

“Recycling of child labour is a very serious issue.”

Sugita Katyal
11 June 2005

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