It is cheaper to buy a child than a buffalo in India, according to activists who marched on a summit of South Asian nations in Delhi yesterday to protest against human trafficking.

Most end up in bonded labour or working as prostitutes, the leaders of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement) said as they escorted more than 200 children to the gates of the Indian Parliament to call for changes to legislation.

“While buffaloes may cost up to 15,000 rupees (£177), children are sold at prices between 500 and 2,000 rupees,” Bhuvan Ribhu, who conducted a study to be released later this year, said.

Usually such reports lay out the absolutely heart-rending numbers:

India still has more than 12.6 million child workers aged 5 to 14. In Asia the estimated number is 122 million, according to the International Labour Organisation. India still has more than 12.6 million child workers aged 5 to 14, the largest number of any country in the world. Campaigners say that the new law has yet to make any difference because India’s economic boom creates an insatiable demand in the cities for cheap labour. In Asia the estimated number of child workers is 122 million, according to the ILO.

The policy response is to ban child labor. “In October India introduced a law banning children under 14 from working as domestic servants or in the food and hospitality sector. Offenders face two years in prison,” the report notes.

I think that banning child labor under the conditions that exist in places such as India is actually a remedy that is worse than the disease. I have written against such a policy here. The problem of children working as laborers belongs to a class of related problems. Consider one more from that class: the problem of selective aborting of female foetuses. Actually, these are just symptoms and not the actual problem. I have written about why I think these are symptoms and not the actual problem. See “The Skewed Sex Ratio“, “The Lop-sided Sex Ratio Revisited“, and “Sex Selection in a Second-best World“.

It is seemingly heartless to point out that basic economic reasoning would predict the abhorrent situation where a cow is worth many times more than a child. If the return on investment on a cow is high, then the demand for cows will be high. The market price of a cow is determined then by the supply relative to demand. By a similar calculus, the return on investment in a child determines the demand for a child. Poor people are by definition poor and don’t have the resources to invest in the education of a child. If they had the resources, they would have invested in the child’s education. But they don’t. The demand for a child among the poor is low, consequently. The supply, however, is fairly high, for understandable reasons. The price once again is determined by the interaction of supply and demand. The supply is high, the demand is low, and therefore the price is low.

I think marching to the capital to point out the problems that poor children face in India is important. But unless the people also recognize that the problem can only be solved by addressing the causes of the problem, there will be little progess. Reducing the supply is one way to increase the price. Another way is to increase the demand. How does one increase the demand for children. By ensuring a positive return on investment. That is something that society can do. If the poor had the opportunity of educating their children, they would go for it.

The poor cannot afford to educate their children. Society can provide free education. But that still does not work out if the parents are sufficiently poor that they cannot afford to forego the income that the child would have had if he or she had been engaged in labor. Clearly, you have to not only provide free education but also compensate the parents for the lost income. All this requires resources. If the society does not have the required resources, or lacks the political will to actually allocate resources to the problem, the end result is the neglect of children.

The other way to increase the price of a child is to reduce the supply of children. Birth control, the availability of abortion services, increasing the marriage age, etc, are ways to address that angle. But they are politically hard to do. The easiest palliative is to ban this or that.

If banning something was sufficient to remove the problem, I would be first in line for banning. If banning drugs or alcohol, for instance, had the beneficial effect of no drug abuse and had no side-effect of organized crime and violence, it would be great — setting aside for the moment the question of whether a person actually owns himself or not.

I think reports such as the one in Timesonline are extremely important because they shame some people into thinking about the problems whose unfortunate consequences are what the report highlights. We as a society should be ashamed that cattle are valued more than children. We can fix the problem but we lack the collective will to do so.

Certainly, children should not have to work for a living. Childhood is when a person needs nurturing, schooling, time to play and explore, the opportunity to grow both emotionally and physically. When a child is forced to work, it hampers her growth, stunts her psychological and intellectual development, and prevents her from realizing her full potential. Child labor is an unmitigated evil and any society which suffers from it should be grossly ashamed of that fact.

That social worker, just like the policy makers who came up with the ban, is a monkey. A monkey which attempts to save a fish from drowning by putting it up on a tree. Well intentioned perhaps but devastating in consequence. From the frying pan into the fire, as it were. Stupid and retarded because these monkeys are unable to distinguish between causes and consequences. Please, lord, please save us from the do-gooders since we are already suffering immeasurably.

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. The children who have to work are most certainly the children of desperately poor parents. Poor people do not love their children any less than rich people do. It is dire necessity that forces them to take that drastic step. It is a choice that they make after considering the alternatives. It is a rational response to an unbearable condition.

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. The parents are extremely poor and cannot adequately feed and clothe their five children. Naturally they don’t have money to spare to send Ramesh to school. Instead they depend on Ramesh’s income of Rs 15 a day from working in a small roadside restaurant to be able to keep their other children from falling from mild malnutrition to severe starvation. Ramesh gets to eat the leftovers at the restaurant.

Then the monkeys move in. Ramesh loses his job at the restaurant and now has to rummage among the garbage bins around the city to keep body and soul together. His parents send out Ramesh’s six-year old little sister to fend for herself as the mother has to work longer hours at a construction site to make up for the loss of Ramesh’s cash income. In about a year, the family is significantly worse off than before the monkeys made their move. From an already bad situation, they find themselves worse off. All thanks to the retards that make policy.

A law banning child labor would be a wonderful policy response if there were evil parents who while being quite capable of giving their children a good caring home instead sent them to out to labor in restaurants and factories. That law would be welcome if prevented from working as domestic help, the child was provided the opportunity to go to school, live in an adequate home, receive sufficient nutrition. But that law does not do any good if the alternative to working as a domestic help (and getting something to eat even though treated as a second class citizen of the house) is slow starvation.

Child labor is a rational strategy within the larger framework of the society. There are many factors that go into that response. First, there is inadequate production of stuff. Which leads to why some people get a very small share of that production. In other words, their incomes are low. These people may then have too many mouths to feed. Low status of women in society leads to more children than can be reasonably cared for. Oversupply of unwanted children leads to a low “price”, that is, they are under-valued. Lacking sufficient social safety net, some families are forced to augment their incomes through child labor.

I don’t see how banning child labor can help the cause of extremely poor children. How about throwing the parents of children who work into prison? Seems to me that that policy would have equally “beneficial” consequences. How about increasing the fines on people who employ children? It will merely make the hiring of children more expensive and fewer children will be employed and the “over supply” of child labor will drive down their wages further. And of course, fines means some government employees will extract bribes from employers so as to look the other way. To make up for additional cost of paying off corrupt government officials, the employers will reduce the “benefits” the child receives for his labor.

The evils of child labor cannot be wished away, nor legislated away. The way out is to address the complex of causes which leads to the effect which is millions of children being denied a childhood. The rational solution would involve, first of all, implementing policies which prevent the birth of too many unwanted children. “Family planning” vigorously implemented. But then, no political party has the guts to do so. Next, make it a law that a child laborer has to be paid the same wages as an adult. This would give employers no reason to employ children when for the same wages they can have an adult worker. Third, provide schools and meals at schools (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) for all children. This would make schools attractive for those children who are poor enough to have to work for food. Finally, provide very poor parents a monthly stipend if their children attend school regularly. This would help them make ends meet without having to send their children to work. THEN, and only then, pass a law banning child labor.

I should stress that all of the above (and more) should be done. Just doing one and not the rest will make things worse. For instance, just giving poor parents a stipend for sending their children to school will incentivize them to have more children. Therefore, you have to limit the number of children that people can have.

Is India capable of doing all that is required to eradicate child labor? No. So in the meanwhile we doom millions of innocent children to a life that I would not wish on a rabid dog: rummage in the garbage and slowly starving to death. At least for the rabid dogs I would simply shoot them. For the children, we impose a living hell.

Mera Bharat Mahan. It is all karma, neh?