Save the Children points out the need for amending the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act (CLPRA) to bring it in line with the Right to Education Act (RTE). The CLPRA prohibits employing children below 14 as domestic help. Unfortunately, child labor, which is analogous to modern-day slavery, is still endemic.
Children who work as domestic help are forced to work long hours with little food, are paid minimal wages or not paid at all, and are largely invisible to the outside world because they live with their employers. This invisibility is one of the main reasons for the vulnerability of child domestic workers to exploitation and abuse.
“You cannot have one law that promises elementary education to all children and another one that regulates child labour. With the RTE now in place, there just cannot be another law which regulates child labour”, a spokesman said. The ‘regulation’ part of the CLPR is in direct contradiction with the constitutional guarantee of free and compulsory elementary education for children between 6 and 14.
Also, around 70% of child laborers work in agriculture. Yet, this form of child labor is left out of the purview of the CLPRA. Any law that attempts to tackle child labor cannot overlook the category of children in agriculture since the majority of child workers are in this sector.
If the Indian government is serious about implementing the RTE, then it must amend the CLPRA urgently. India is one of the very few countries that has not ratified ILO Convention 182 on banning the worst forms of child labour. According to the 2001 census, there are 12.6 million children under the age of 14 engaged in child labour, but civil society places the number of child labour at a more realistic 40 million or so.
While poor families need all the help they can get in their effort to make a living and this often entails pushing their own children to work, society must be educated on the equally pressing need of extracting its disadvantaged children from the vicious circle of poverty and lack of education.
Source: Save the Children
