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The Labour Ministry’s notification now bans employing children below 14 years, under the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act. It bars some specific forms of harmful child labour. However, all again the same question remains as, how the government will ensure effective implementation of the Notice? A ban without a plan will backfire; merely enacting law is not enough, the government should work to wipe the root causes as well.

This act aims at getting children out of the workplace and into the schools but as you know, it is always easier said, than done! Labour not only harms a child’s development physically, psychologically, socially and developmentally but also takes away their childhood and education. It is a social scourge, which must be nipped in the bud; denying children, the right to education deprives them and the country off a bright future!

This Child labour is a serious problem; everyone must understand and try to curb this with effective campaigns driven by labour management and government entities. We all must come united and call the government requesting them to take all the necessary steps to stop the child labour and plea for a global focus on this. If each person participates – elimination of child labour will be a reality soon. So let us get together, stop the small little hands from working, and turn this dream true. What do you think? Write me on:

http://www.indiademocracy.com/article/user/article.jsp?articleid=art20061031094201

Mehak Malhotra

I’d appreciate if there are any alternative solutions.

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Regarding 0 sum
Transactions are not 0 sum.
when a buyer and seller come together,
what do they do?
Exchange pleasentaries
Discuss price
exchange money and good
Say thank you to each other and go away.
Both sides are happy with the outcome
Hell no it is not a 0 sum game.
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This ties back into your wealth distribution.
The best way to move money around is to
pay some one to do something useful.
Not an insurance scheme where you get a check weather you work or not
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1. explore wealth
2. accumulate wealth
3. distribute wealth

However for it to happen we need to

1. prevent race to the bottom
2. promote race to the top

I am curious to know your view on zero-sum.
Is economy zero-sum?

http://vodwins.stanford.edu/hoover/Libert200.asx

The basic problem i have with your assertion that you are pushing for a redistribution through government without
any focus on increasing production.
US and many other countries can afford this because the americans have more production
and the added redistribution and the added inefficiencies caused through the government is a price that is acceptable.

Google videos used to have free to choose series(friedman’s) online for free, but i couldnt find it online anymore.
Here is an excerpt on youtube(google)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CgEMiFlvzO8

I have stated my opposition to such policies in context for india.

India needs to focus on what empowering individuals and focus on policies that
increase production not redistribution.

India needs to create more Narayana Murthy’s and less dumbasses who create policies that distribute poverty.

And dude race to the bottom was in vogue 5 during seattle wto round, get new slogans dude.

A credible unemployment insurance for people living in India whether they work or not will prevent a number of social issues such as child labor, dowry, bribery, corruption, collusion, underemployment, desperation, and reservations.

Dude you have mentioned your unemployment insurance solution on this site over and over again.
Please explain how this would work?
the intersting thing is ‘weather they work or not’ bit…

Now if I as a charitable person am looking to educate 1 person.
I will pick suresh over ramesh.
Honestly the government should be doing the same,
The bulk of population which is rural has inadequate infrastructure but it exists.
The marginal cost increase in those infrastructure will help more people.

The gist of saying this:
1. All child labour are not bad when the labour is not exploitive and the child is allowed to live life as any normal person.
2. Government should think “out of the box” and implement policies taking into account that millions of Indians in village needs bare minimum earning person to survive.
3. Only feeding a child won’t help, put structure (NGO, Village Panchayat, etc) in place so that the investment on child produces result (knowledge and not education mere for food)
4. Revisit the farmer policy and fact is still millions of people in village works for landlords living in Cities!!

I have lived early childhood in semi urban cum village and I personally have seen many successful cases where the child has now grown to become a well settled and earning individual in comparison to those children who neither got educated because lack of money nor their parents allowed them to work during childhood.

Having said that I am not supporting exploitive child labour but merely putting fact that in India many villagers are living under very complex life structure where survival is BIG factor. So implement what suits to masses.

When you talk about having equal wages for children as adults, one cannot overlook the possibility that though a law might come into force intending to enforce it,exploitation might just go up. The flipside of the employer not wanting to hire a child to do the same work for which he might get an adult is that he might see greater profit in actually not hiring an adult but a child who can be forced to work more and/or paid less due to his vulnerability due to age and need vis-a-vis the employer.
Also important is that children are generally employed at places where the ‘payroll’ does not exist on paper. Even regular adult employees might not be on the payroll of that employer for various reasons like tax evasion. This means that one would have to first devise a system/ policy that makes a ‘payroll’ mandatory, and displays the actual number of employees and wages being paid. And as an incentive to the employer to not evade tax, to not maintain false accounts, to not employ children, you would need another set of policy reforms, probably tax reforms. And a foolproof policy is a dream. You will have loopholes and people finding their way around it.
Of course there’s always hope!

The point is, a child working is a childhood destroyed. Monkeys or otherwise, anybody who realises that simple truth, and tries to work in that direction, does a service to the children and to the society.

The midday meal and the monthly stipend schemes for sending children to school are already there. All you say is, if there is less number of children, there will be less number of children who are working.

Child labor is a symptom; it is not the problem. The problem lies elsewhere and unless the problem itself is addressed, merely addressing the symptom makes the situation immensely worse for the victim children.

I am hoping here, that you meant it is a symptom of poverty, because that is what it is. I agree with you when you said that poor parents also love their children equally. It is after this that I would like to digress. Most children who work, are children of illiterate parents. The parents, who follow the “upbringing traditions” that go back generations, plan to bring up their children the same way they were brought up: with no education, with labour as a child, and no hope of being better.

Consider a hypothetical scenario. Ramesh is the 8-year old son of very poor parents living in a slum in Mumbai with 4 siblings younger than him.

Let me give you a real story. This one, is of a girl who comes under this law. Her name is irrelevant. Her mother lied to her and sneaked her away from school, to work as a domestic worker in a home in Hyderabad. She was promised around 2,000 rupees a year. She was also, after two months of working there, almost burnt to death by her employer on a false charge of thievery.
The “Monkeys” rescued her from work and put her into a bridge course camp so that she could lead a better life.

Child labor is a rational strategy within the larger framework of the society.

Let us consider the same society that you have taken into consideration. Let us assume, that all the children are forced to go to school, and the only labour available in this set-up, is adults. This automatically pulls up the demand for labour. Which, consequently, would pull up the wage rate of the labourers. Also, by hiring only adult workers, you are ensuring more productivity in the labour, than when you were employing children: Children are unskilled labour, and therefore offer less productivity.
Let me also assure you, that this is a tried and tested theory, and it works right now in around 200 villages of Andhra Pradesh.
You are only looking at children as being more mouths to feed, whereas most “extremely poor parents” have lots of children to have more hands to work, and earn. This is not to say that they don’t love them, they do. In India, the parents don’t send the children to work only because they need the money. They send them to work, because they don’t see the immediate benefits of education.
You regarded children as “unwanted” and an “over supply of labour”. Let me try and offer you a new perspective of them, perhaps as “potential labour” which, in this world that is moving in leaps and bounds by the day towards a global world, needs educated people first, and skilled labour only next.

As for the questions you are asking in the next paragraph, I would like you to think with slightly less cynicism. Child Labour is a social evil, just as sati and dowry is. By banning child labour, the government is only taking the first step into trying to decrease the poverty levels. By eradicating child labour, and at the same time ensuring free and compulsory education (which is by the way, “free” and “compulsory”, so the parents don’t have to pay for it), the country is trying to start at the grass-root level of poverty, and then slowly move upwards.

Let me explain this.
Let’s treat child labour as the first step of the poverty cycle. Children are working. Adults are working. Now if children stop working, adults are paid more since a lot of the labour offered by the children now has to be taken up by adults. This reduces the unemployment rate (which is, in India, very high), as well as completely removes the children from the labour market. This also increases the income, since adults have to be paid more. If you would like to look at the production side, even this goes higher because adults are more capable workers than children.
Now, when children are not working, something has to be done with them, so they go to school. So the children are being educated (for free, and compulsorily). When the children are being educated, they form the first step in eradication of poverty: literacy. Sanitation and health come naturally with education.

About your next point, of family planning, it would make a difference, but wouldn’t an educated skilled young workforce (considering all children will eventually get out of work and be educated) be an asset rather than a liability?
About children being paid in the first place, where is your conscience?! Why must a child work at all??

And then, children ARE being fed atleast one nutritious meal a day (I would suggest a google search on the Right To Food For Children Website, where you will find the supreme court directive to this, and continuous updates on how it is working, which I will summarize as- quite well.) Young Children are being provided Anganwadi centres, with baby food, health check ups, proper toilets, a meal for children above the age of three, people to look after them etc.

There IS infrastructure in this country for better development, but the fact is, when children go to work instead of school, it is not being used!

To sum up, I would like to say that the cause of child labour is the argument of poverty, and not poverty itself. That is, when people support children going to work instead of school “because they are poor” you are, infact, creating a situation for more poverty and not lessening it.

Government does rehabilitation also for the children who are freed from this and they have announced 100 Rs stipend for every month.
Again considering hypothetically In Delhi ,if all those 25,000 children are freed , those job opportunities will be given to the adults.8 yr old Ramesh ’s father has to work now and he might get one of those opportunities and the trend may get changed. Its just a start .

““Family planning” vigorously implemented”

What do you mean by this? You said 400 $ fine cant help.But how are we going to force that not-more-than-2 restriction .By some means of punishment ,right ?By making their ration cards invalid ,as you said
1.they should have been given ration card first
2.This will do nothing other than worsening the situation .They’ll send all the children to

work or the entire family will be starving.

If you say we are going to encourage people who does family planning operation by giving them some money,food etc.,the plan is already in place.

Meal Plan.

It is already implemented in some of the states.One of the plan government once did was to increase the count of children in schools by forcing the teachers to collect children from the streets.But implementation is still a question mark .Though it helped some children .

Stipend for Parents.

Again it has its own holes.Child labor is partially because of poor

parents and partially because of abusive parents.We cant trust the parents in this case to give them the stipend to nurture their children .

As you rightly said, Child Labor has many root causes .Those are the same problems we’ve been fighting for a while.But this needs some immediate strict action and cant wait .And the Government should build more rehabilitaion centers and schools and save the future of those children.

In short I say,What they have done is 100% correct and they should not just stop with that .

now tell the farmer that his kids are not allowed to help on the farm…

and fine my aunt for scolding her kids if they don’t do their errands properly… which includes clean toilets, iron clothes, wash dishes, and clear the table after meals…

and arrest my friend who pays for the education, meals, and clothes of a girl who is their household help…

and shoot me for letting my local grocer’s boy deliver groceries to my place…

and i could go on…

Also not sure you are being sarcastic about “family planning” or not. Probably being dumb and missing it, but my impression from your writing would be that you would be opposed to it also.

Keep writing. You provide interesting grist for the grey mill…

cheers-