working children | ಕೆಲಸಮಾಡುವ ಮಕ್ಕಳು

Need some odd jobs done at home? Simple, just go to some rural area. There are plenty of kids out there, pick one of them. Money rules – you have it, the kid’s family dosen’t – so… you rule! Just throw those poor fellows some money, its a great thing for them. Get the kid back home. Give him some corner of your house to stay in, and give him a bit of food every now and then, and get him to do all your jobs. You’re doing him a great favor, without you he would’ve been nothing in that village. But thank’s to you, he’s come to the city with all its wonderful opportunities of “coming up in life”, and he better show his gratitude by shutting up and meekly doing all your work!

There are plenty of people who believe exactly this.

When I was a kid, at some point I wanted to earn money, so my friend and me had gotten together to make some paper envelopes by folding newspapers. Then gone to a neighbourhood shop and bugged him into buying them, and made our first rupee. It felt great! So I feel there’s nothing wrong with kids working per say – its character building and all.

But of course there’s one key difference. For us at that time, it was a kind of entertainment, it was out of choice – just for fun.

But I don’t think that there’s any justification in the world that children be made to work out of compulsion. Its simply incorrigible. If I was supreme ruler of the world, I’d make it an unconditional law that no child has should ever be compelled to work on the planet.

I recall Whitney Houston’s song Greatest Love Of All

I believe that children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be

Nice song, very meaningful. But look at this article in this morning’s newspaper: One more a case of a 10 year old maid branded because she was supposed to have stolen some earrings. Oh what a pity!! This particular case may seem to be an extreme case, but a lot of times, child laborers are abused because they’re easy targets. It may seem from the article that the logical reason was that couple in question were mad at the child for apparently having stolen the earring. But in my opinion, the real reason is that the couple had accumulated all kinds of crappy frustrations over time, and just that the child turned out to be a convenient defenseless victim for them to express it. (There have been countless incidents of such things happening, but I think the clearest example was of mob violence for no real reason.)

The couple in question is quite well to do – any resident of Bangalore would be able to attest that an apartment on Sarjapur Road is quite expensive…

The employers — A Rajashekar Reddy and Aruna — who reside in an apartment in Trinity Acres on Sarjapur Road

Yet the details of this story are so incredibly heart-rending…

While talking to Deccan Herald at APSA, Teji, who speaks only Telugu, alleged: “They (the Reddy couple) gave me only two meals a day. I was never given breakfast. I was made to sleep on the floor. They used to hit me with a belt.”

Look at the deceit the couple have shamelessly reverted to in a weak attempt to defend themselves… a lot of times such underhanded tactics may appear to work atleast at the apparent level, but this is one instance where it hasn’t…

When produced before the CWC, the Reddy couple said the girl was not branded but sustained burns when hot water fell on her. However, medical reports from Victoria Hospital indicate that the burns are due to pressing of hot iron, the Koramangala police said.

If we consider this couple before this newspaper article, they would’ve appeared to be so well to do from outside – so prosperous, everything going on fine, “life is made” and so on.

Upendra gave me an analogy recently – that even a lot of well to do people are like ducks – swimming calmly on the surface of the water, but under the surface of the water – they’re paddling like hell!

People like this couple may think they are sneakily managing to get away, but sometime or the other a circumstance may come which simply rips the deceptive facade apart! What is the use of living fooling the whole world, when we can never fool ourselves though we keep trying all the time. [I cannot say to what extent I am living “true to myself” but atleast I can only compare what I am now to what I was a few years ago and say that I try a lot lesser now 😉 ]

Anyway coming to the main point of child labor, out of one of the 50 things that Nipun quotes here , one point that really caught me was:

# There are 44 million child labourers in India. Worldwide, the UN Labour Organization estimates 246 million child labourers aged between five and seventeen. Of those, 171 million work in hazardous conditions; roughly 8.4 million are involved in what ILO calls ‘the unconditional worst forms of child labour.’

If J. Krishnamurthy happened to be reading my post here, I speculate he would probably ask me “Yes Sir, you are absolutely right. Its a terrible thing. But what are you going to do about it? Is it that you can do nothing? Or you do not care?”

In this aspect, I feel helpless. In the first place there already are plenty of people very actively working on this issue, but I guess the scale of the problem is such that its never enough. Its a really hard problem to crack. There have been times I’ve investigated this in the past and I’ve found that it unravels a lot of other things, like working children are actually having other people who are depending on them. Or as an alternative, the child would have to go back to the village where – usually there’s no infrastructure or future of any kind – and he or she could sometimes even be a great burden to the parents.

On the other hand, in many households the child indeed gets a good deal, they also teach him to read and write and send him to school and so on. So where does one really draw the line, and say that in which situation its ok, and in when its not?

Hopefully these people have some answers…

• India Literacy Project
• Paraspara – I’d actually been to this place a couple of times, will try to dig up the report to put it here.
• Parikrama Humanity Foundation (see also)