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The Child Labour Amendment Bill 2016 has failed the children of India.
The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2016, though has completely banned employment of children below the age of 14 years, however, allows children to work in family enterprises. The fact remains that their education will get affected with an increased chance of dropping out
If your life revolves around working for a corporate or being a housewife or even a student the chances are that you will rarely meet even one of the 33 million children from the age group of 0-18 years and are working as child labourers. That doesn’t mean that they do not exist, much less the fact that they are at the precipice of losing their chance at education or making a decent life.
Most of these children are engaged in the unorganised and un-regulated sector. High levels of poverty and unemployment, in addition to a lack of an adequate social security net, compel parents to allow their children to work in hazardous occupations.
The good news is that the government has finally amended the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2016, although it took the administration 30 years to do so; the bad news is that the amendment has left a gaping hole and it may not after all protect these children.
Though the bill rightly completely bans employment of children below the age of 14 years, it has neatly made an exception that allows children to work in family enterprises. This guiding thought here being education and work can go hand in hand for children. This thought, however, goes against the spirit of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) 2009.
The fact is that even if children work in family enterprises it will affect their education and learning outcomes, as well as their health and overall development. If working along with studies, these children face issues of inattentiveness, fatigue and lesser attendance at school and lack of playtime with peers in and after school. These children actually are left with no option but to hold on to their economic roles, so essential to their family’s survival. Once they start earning, the chances of these working children returning to school decrease dramatically.
To check this hypothesis, CRY (Child Rights and You) analysed the census data and it revealed that close to 1.4 million child labourers in India in the age group of 7-14 years cannot write their own name. It translates into close to 33% of child labourers in this age group being illiterate. Even among those children who work for less than 6 months a year in the family economy, a shocking 2 million have compromised on their education.
The government justifies the allowance for children to work in the family set-up as it will not be in a typical “employer-employee” relationship. However, there is enough evidence to contradict this argument, given the definition of family and family enterprise under the act. For the purpose of this law, “family’’ in relation to a child means his mother, father, brother, sister and father’s sister and brother and mother’s sister and brother; and family enterprise means any work, profession or business performed by the members of the family with the engagement of other persons.
If these definitions were to be followed, they actually open up a range of work settings for a child. Take, for instance, the sugarcane industry where children load and unload sugarcane from the truck and clean the cane. Children are also involved in tasks such as collecting and making bundles of sugarcane for further selling or feeding cattle. These children not only face hazards related with the occupation, but are also exploited in what clearly becomes an employee-employer relationship.
Additionally, this definition has the potential to become a loophole for trafficking. The tragic fact is that in most cases of trafficking of children, the perpetrator is a close family member or community member.
While the government cites the preservation of social fabric and learning of traditional occupations as reasons behind allowing children to work in family enterprises, however, there is a great possibility of an occupation being affixed with one’s caste wherein children are bound to their traditional family occupations and not given an opportunity to learn new employable trades as part of their education.
Now that the new legislation is in place, it will be interesting to know how the government plans to ensure that working children get enough time to sleep, play and study. And how will the state verify that the child is actually working for the family enterprise, within the family set-up and not abused?
Although the government has increased the punishment and penalty for the violators, poor prosecution rates and conviction of child labour cases still plague our system. We have consistently witnessed weak implementation of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, and the amendment does not incorporate significant measures to improve it. Actually, we fall short of resources for implementation. So how do we ensure the safety of these children?
To begin with, the government should have banned child labour in its entirety, without any exceptions. It would have been a beginning towards the vision of transforming India had the child labour act been viewed as social legislation rather than just another labour law.