Employing children below 14 to be an offence

Raising the bar on child labour, the government is set to debar employment of children below the age of 14 in any industry. Only those between 14 to 18 years can be employed except in hazardous industries. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 2, 2012, 02:22:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Raising the bar on child labour, the government is set to debar employment of children below the age of 14 in any industry. Only those between 14 to 18 years can be employed except in hazardous industries.

The existing Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, allows employment of children of up to 14 years of age in the industries not considered to be hazardous. Hazardous industries include tobacco, stone crushing, catering, mining, cement industry and crackers.

This will change if the government accepts a new set of recommendations of the Labour ministry which aims to tune Indian child labour law with norms of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

The ILO’s convention of child labour seeks to provide minimum age of employment and says that no children below the age of 14 should be employed. India has to abide by the convention as its own domestic law --- Right To Education --- guarantees free and compulsory education to all children in the age group of 6-14 years.

It cannot happen without amending the Child Labour Act, which allows employment of children below 14 years of age. Therefore, the Labour ministry has now circulated a Cabinet note seeking complete ban on any form of child labour.

“Once the changes are enacted employing any children below the age of 14 will be a criminal offence,” a senior government functionary said, adding that it will help in ensuring that the children in 6-14 age group reach schools.

As per 2001 census, there were 1.29 crore child labourers in India. The data on child labour for 2011 is yet to be released.

The ministry has, however, not accepted the recommendation of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights for defining age of a child as of 18 years on the ground that a large number of poor families are dependant on their children for livelihood.

Therefore, the ministry has proposed that children in 14-18 age group should be allowed to seek work in non-hazardous industries with property safety mechanism.

Employing a child labour can result in jail term of three months and a fine of up to Rs 20,000 or both. NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) will be starting a campaign for child labour free India from next week by seeking support of political parties to approve the proposed amendments. "We will visit political leaders as part of our campaign," said Rakesh Senger of BBA.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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