What is Child Labour
Is it really all that difficult to define the term child labour?
Do we need any increased intelligence quotient to understand it?
If the answer is no to both these questions, then why is child labour a rampant problem across the length and breadth of India?
Why is it one of the prime focus problems where UNICEF is concerned?
And this is not a problem with under developed or developing nations, but exists in the so-called developed nations.
Lets halt for a bit here and get into the technical understanding of the term child labour…
So, in layman’s terms, what is child labour?
It is any kind of work children are made to do that harms or exploits them physically, mentally, morally, or by preventing access to education.
However, one must also understand that all work is not bad or exploitive for children. In fact, certain jobs help in enhancing the overall personality of the child. For instance, children delivering newspapers prior to going to school. Or then children taking up light summer jobs that do not interfere with their school timings. When they are given pocket money earning oriented tasks, they understand the value of money, as well as respect it even more.
While this are the positive aspects of tasks and working, the actual universal problem of child labour is the exploitive and dangerous work and working conditions children are put through. For instance, in north India young children, below the age of 14 are made to work in the carpet industry. Their delicate fingers create the world’s finest and most expensive carpets. The children are working twelve to fourteen hours a day. Many lose their fingers. Some are starved. And a number die each year because of the torturous circumstances under which they are made to work.
This is a crime. There have been instances of so-called decent middle class, as well as upper-class people employing young children as domestic helpers. But, they are not working as helpers, but bonded labour. They are made slaves. Frightening stories of how they have been physically tortured are printed in the daily newspapers. And in spite of stringent action being taken against such employers, the problem continues.
“...States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.”
(UN stipulation in article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child)