And children labour on...

A year of a ban on domestic child labour has brought some change in the lives of a few thousand rescued children. Chetan Chauhan reports the ban's impact.

Updated on: Oct 10, 2007, 02:48:16 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A year of a ban on domestic child labour has brought some change in the lives of a few thousand rescued children, but lakhs continue to lead miserable lives in

dhabas

and in the homes of influential families, including those of government officials.

A Planning Commission official was recently booked for employing a child as domestic help. The child committed suicide.

A few weeks ago, the NGO Pratidhi rescued a child from a

dhaba

opposite Town Hall after an MCD official reported his plight to childline, a children’s helpline. Of the two domestic child labour violations detected in Goa, one was in a state government office.

With just a few rescues, the official estimate of children still employed in homes and roadside eateries in Delhi and Mumbai is over 1.5 lakh. “The situation has not changed as government agencies aren’t willing to take full-fledged action against culprits,” said Raaj Mangal Prasad of Pratidhi. A Labour Ministry official, however, said officials are not permitted to raid homes and dhabas to check the age of the servants employed.

The status report on implementation of the ban from October 10, 2006, indicates that the government knows that in most states, barring some in the south, enforcement has been poor. “It cannot happen overnight,” an official said, but added that the biggest achievement of the ban was generating awareness among the masses.

But the ministry holds out hope for the future. Things may change as the Centre has decided to overcome two major problems cited by state labour departments in the enforcement of the ban — no guidelines on rescue and rehabilitation and not enough bridge schools for rescued children.

The ministry has initiated a process to formulate guidelines on migration, trafficking, rescue and repatriation of child labourers. “Under these, each state will have to nominate a nodal officer for restoring children either back to their parents or for rehabilitation,” a ministry official said.

All central government schemes for child labourers will be brought under the new guidelines, the official said. Developing infrastructure and economic upliftment of families of victims is another aspect.

For cities like Delhi and Mumbai, focal centres for trafficking of child labourers, the ministry has proposed big residential schools for rescued children. “These will be different from conventional schools. They will be bridge schools and help improve (awareness) levels of rescued children for admission in regular schools.”

The government will also introduce a system to track and monitor rescued child labourers.

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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