Child labour will now be tackled at its roots

The Planning Commission has agreed in principle to a proposal made by Union Labour Minister Oscar Fernandes, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Jan 29, 2007, 22:46:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Planning Commission has agreed in principle to a proposal made by Union Labour Minister Oscar Fernandes on adopting a more inclusive approach to end the problem of child labour. There will be schemes for restoring child workers into the mainstream and for financially empowering their parents. The plan will become functional from the next financial year.

Child workers will also get access to better education through residential schools to be opened in areas where the problem is acute and they will be entitled for priority admission in other schools. To keep them in the school system, the government proposes to give them stipends and midday meals. "Through education, we want to usher them into the mainstream,"a senior government official said.

When the children cross the age of 14, after which the Child Labour Prohibition Act no longer applies to them, they will get special vocational training in sectors which offer job opportunities. This will apply to children between 14 and 17 years, an official said.

The Labour ministry approach takes into consideration that child labour cannot be eradicated unless poverty is tackled. "It has to be a joint effort by all the ministries in the social sector to improve the financial condition of these parents," a labour ministry official said. The ministries listed for collaboration are Health, Women and Child Development, Rural Development and Urban Development ministry.

On its part, the Labour ministry will run the National Child Labour Project in all 600 districts as opposed to the current 250. The ministry will rope in NGOs to run schools and health centres for child workers who have been rescued.

The government also wants to widen the scope of the industries where child labour is to be banned. A decision will be made only after discussions with the state governments, the official said. In October 2006, the government had banned child labour from the domestic sector and hospitality industry.

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

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