Boardings beckon child workers

Dame luck is smiling on the children of lesser gods. The government has waved its magic wand, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 13, 2006, 02:15:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Dame luck is smiling on the children of lesser gods. The government has waved its magic wand.

After bringing the hospitality industry and the domestic helps under the child labour regulations from October 10, the government now plans to set up residential schools in every district for child labourers.

A five-year-rehabilitation blueprint — the biggest-ever project drawn up by the ministry of labour — will cover 1.26 crore child labourers.

The ministry has asked the Planning Commission for Rs 1,500 crore to cover 600 districts under the National Child Labour Project (NCLP) as against 250 districts, at present.

Ministry officials said children, aged between 9 to 14, working in 57 hazardous industries, dhabas and at homes, will be covered under the revised project. “NGOs will be authorised to open residential schools for 40 children in every district to bring them to the mainstream,” the official said.

These schools will be set up after a detailed survey by a district-level committee headed by district collector, who will monitor the scheme.

The schools will be set up near child labour endemic areas and the students will be given a stipend of Rs 100 per month. They will also be brought under other government schemes like the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, the official said.

Ambitious it may sound, questions on its feasibility abound: whether it will work or not like most other government schemes.

Officials, however, cite the Andhra Pradesh model to prove that child labour figures have come down in areas under the NCLP. But they refuse to set a deadline for complete eradication of child labour.

“There are a number of factors linked to child labour and we are not the nodal ministry to deal with all the issues,” the official explained.

Education apart, the government has now broadened its focus to identify child labour endemic areas in the country, which need special focus.

Places like Sitamarhi in Bihar and West Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh are the biggest source of child labour — supplying the bulk of little boys and girls to the metropolitan cities. “The need of the hour is to tackle the problem of employment in specific locations,” the official emphasised.

As part of the new strategy, every state government has submitted action plans to deal with the problem of child labour.

Most states have promised to work on rehabilitation and training of child labourers. “We will come up with the National Vocational Training Mission before next year to support the state government initiatives,” the ministry official promised.

India banned hiring of children under 14 as domestic helps, industrial labour and in unorganised sectors last month.

Email Chetan Chauhan: chetan @hindustantimes.com

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

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.