International Child Labour Day: ‘Cannot use poverty as an excuse for lack of education’

The event celebrated the beneficiaries of the Naya Savera Bal Shram Vidya Yojana and the families of the U.P. Board of Construction Workers, whose children benefit from the scheme designed specifically for them.

LUCKNOW Uttar Pradesh labour department and UNICEF U.P. held an event on Monday to mark the International Child Labour Day. The event celebrated the beneficiaries of the Naya Savera Bal Shram Vidya Yojana and the families of the U.P. Board of Construction Workers, whose children benefit from the scheme designed specifically for them. It was also announced at the event that hotspots from 20 districts of U.P. have been declared as ‘child labour free’.

For representation only (Deepak Gupta)

The labour department, after surveying the districts with the highest rate of child labour, identified hotspots in wards where it was most rampant, and began the process of releasing and rehabilitating the children, which involves enquiry and verification, based on which an authentication is done by the labour department, and then is endorsed by the district magistrate Mansoor Qadri, child protection specialist at UNICEF.

Lucknow, for instance, was one district where hotspots in eight wards were identified and acted upon. Child labourers in the age group of 7 to 16 could be seen working at tea stalls, streetside food stalls, or just walking the streets during red lights and selling pens, feather dusters, incense sticks, or cleaning windshields. Other districts identified are -- Kanpur Nagar, Ghazipur, Prayagraj, Varanasi, Ghaziabad, Budaun, Bareilly, and Shravasti, among others.

According to Piyush Antony, social policy specialist with UNICEF, one can only be certain that child labour has been entirely eradicated if the panchayats and urban local bodies get involved in the process. “It is not possible for the labour department or any state department to wipe out child labour at the rural ward levels because they are not familiar with the families and lifestyles there. Poverty is not something we can use as an excuse for a lack of education,” she said.

Along a similar line, Qadri, also present at the event, said that to properly rescue a child from child labour, the first concern is to keep the identity of the child private to protect them from the employer. The rescue process ought to be a planned one where the child too has to be counselled, the right terminology and language has to be used in the rescue so as to not imply that the child was in the wrong, and finally the due process has to be followed where the children are produced before the authorities, and need to be sheltered separately and away from the employer.

“It is possible to achieve the goal of a child labour free Uttar Pradesh in five years if all aligned departments take equal responsibility in the process,” he said. Influencers and volunteers from different districts with UNICEF who aided in reaching and facilitating the process with the beneficiaries were also awarded at this event.