According to a new rule issued by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), employing children under the age of 14 as domestic help will invite both penal and disciplinary action for the bureaucrats. The rule comes into effect from Tuesday.
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The DoPT has issued instructions to all government departments to advise officials not to engage domestic help under 14. The circular was issued in the wake of the ministry of Labour and Employment’s notification prohibiting employment of children in dhabas, restaurants and homes.
Unlike citizens, who would be penalised only under relevant sections of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, the bureaucrats will also have to face disciplinary action under service rules.
The DoPT recently asked all the government departments to enlist procedure for departmental inquiry against the officials, who employed children.
The move, officials said, serves the twin-objective of deterring bureaucrats from employing children as well as initiating action against the officials violating the Act. “We have asked the enforcing agencies to pick VIPs to highlight the problem and create awareness among people about the new rule,” a ministry official said.
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The Labour ministry on Monday released figures of child labour in the hospitality industry and as domestic help. Of the total 1.2 crore children, 1.85 lakh are employed as domestic help and another 70,000 in restaurants and dhabas. Most of them are employed in the top 10 cities of the country. In India, 13 states including five Bimaru states are considered endemic to child labour.
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The Labour ministry on Monday released figures of child labour in the hospitality industry and as domestic help. Of the total 1.2 crore children, 1.85 lakh are employed as domestic help and another 70,000 in restaurants and dhabas. Most of them are employed in the top 10 cities of the country. In India, 13 states including five Bimaru states are considered endemic to child labour.
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On the other hand, ministry of Women and Child Development has asked the state governments to create aditional capacity to provide shelter to those children who would be thrown out of work, after the rule is implemented.
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.
