Child Labour

The most innocent phase in human life is the childhood. It is that stage of life when the human foundations are laid for a successful adult life. It is the phase when we are carefree, fun-loving, learning, playing… Go back into your childhood and for most of us, there are beautiful memories. And how wonderful to have grown up with such carefree abandonment while we had parents, grandparents and others looking after us. But, this is the story of not too many children.

Yes, there are far more children scarred and tormented. They hate they childhood. They would do anything to get out of the dungeons of being children and controlled and tortured by others. They want to break-free from this world. Some manage to get out and get a better life, but many continue to be where they are, not out of choice, but force.

This is the true story of child labour. There are industries and individuals, who employee young innocent children. They put them to work under grueling circumstances. They make them work for long hours weaving delicate threads to make the world’s most expensive carpets. They make them work in dangerous factory units manufacturing fireworks. They make children carry load even heavier than their own body weight.

There are individual households that have their own young children growing up in a cozy family environment, but they hire children as domestic help. They beat them and physically torture when they make a mistake. They starve them and give them their children’s worn out clothes.

Such is the story of millions of children in India. It is painful and yet true. The future of this nation is the children. And instead of nourishing them and nurturing them with a healthy childhood, they are letting be tortured in dungeon-like work places. And a large number of employed children do not even live to see their teenage years.

Poverty and lack of education are the two primary reasons for the every-growing social malice of child labour. Parents in the poverty zone of society give birth to money-making machines, and not children. They carry infants to earn more on the streets from begging. Then as they grow they make them beggars, and eventually sell them to employers.

Can this crime against children be eradicated from society? The answer is yes, as long as we take measures to first bring it under control. Once the malady is under control then we can slowly, steadily and surely eradicate this problem and give every child a well-deserved healthy and normal childhood.