Lost innocence: Millions of children toil as labourers

Aditya (name changed) was just 11 years old when his brother brought him from Shivamogga to Bengaluru, and put him to work in a bakery. For a meagre salary, he worked through the week, from six in the morning till the shutters went down at night, saving money to support his ailing mother back home.

After working at the bakery in Rajajinagar for more than a year, Aditya was rescued from Majestic bus stand three months ago.

“I had saved some Rs 18,000. I would send home the money through the driver of a private bus. The people from Childline caught me while I was at the bus station to meet the driver,” he said, when DH spoke to him at the open shelter for boys run by the Sparsha Trust in Hesaraghatta, Bengaluru.

The lack of a support system forced Abdul Khan (name changed), now 15, to run away from his home in Ballari. On his second day in the city, he was rescued from the bus station and put in a boys’ home.

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Before that, Abdul dropped out of school in Class V for a year and began working in his uncle’s garage. Re-
enrolled a year later, he attended school for four days before dropping out again. He claims that the school refused to let him attend classes without an Aadhaar card and his relatives didn’t bother to get one made for him.

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Harsha (13) and Suraj (14) (names changed) started working at a sugarcane juice shop in Kunigal town, in Tumakuru. Forced to slog from morning till evening, they slept in the shop’s premises. They weren’t paid wages for their work; they were given just three meals a day and new clothes or snacks on occasion. Suraj, the elder brother, says he liked Maths and Kannada at school but dropped out because “there was no one to help us study at home.”

All of them look away when asked details about their family or conditions of work, offering short responses.

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Thrust into the adult world beyond their ken, they have modest ambitions for their future: a government job, enrolling in the army or simply getting back to school.

Across the country and in Karnataka, millions of children like Aditya and Abdul come to be engaged in child labour for various reasons: neglect, abuse, straitened circumstances and even trafficking.

With close to 4.2 lakh children engaged in child labour (2011 census), Karnataka ranks eighth in the list of states with a high number of child labourers in the country, outranked in South India only by Andhra Pradesh (5th place).

The latest survey (2016-18) conducted by Karnataka’s Department of Labour, however, says there are merely 22,882 children engaged in child labour. According to the government data, the worst-performing districts in the state are Bengaluru urban and those in the Kalyana Karnataka region: Raichur, Yadgir and Koppal. Grassroots workers believe that the actual number is much higher.

According to the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment data, Karnataka has seen 143 cases of violation in 2018, only next to Uttar Pradesh (261). The total number of cases recorded in the country for that year was 823.

Where are children working?

An analysis by Child Rights and You (CRY) indicates that a majority of children, in excess of 60%, continue to be exploited in the agricultural sector, though the share of children working in the service industry also saw a rapid and sharp increase.

“In the morning at RTO Circle in Raichur city, you can see several children being loaded onto ‘tum-tums’ (rickshaws) to harvest cotton,” says Syed Hafizullah, an education activist in Raichur district.

The situation is no better in nearby Devadurga taluk. “You see child labourers everywhere you look, carted off to work in these vehicles,” Haifzullah says.

According to Hafizullah and other activists, the agriculturalists prefer children for cotton and chilli harvesting because they get away with making children work long hours for low wages.

“There is now a contract system in place where the child is paid Rs 6 - 7 per kg of cotton harvested,” says Sudarshan, who works with the Childline in Raichur.

“In the agriculture sector, we see huge trafficking of children. Nobody knows and nobody cares,” he says.

In cities like Bengaluru, most of the children in labour are trafficked from other districts or states, says P Lakshapathi, executive director of Association for Promoting Social Action. “If you look at each case closely, we see at least six to seven laws under the IPC are violated. Even when a case is registered, we face a lot of hassle to prove it in the court,” he says.

“All school dropouts are potential child labourers. In a village, a child who is not in school usually ends up working,” says Raghavendra Bhat of GOK-UNICEF Child Protection Project, Koppal, who has worked on tackling child labour across districts in North Karnataka.

Activists say the school dropout rates can indicate the extent of the problem. However, with the enormous pressure on teachers to shore up student enrollment and attendance rates, there is often massive under-reporting in government schools.

A 2019 survey conducted by CREA, an NGO, in five gram panchayats of Raichur district, found a total of 318 children below the age of 18 (123 boys, 195 girls) out of school and engaged in child labour.

“During the survey, the teachers informally gave us the list of dropouts, but they won’t hand over the numbers officially, because they say it becomes a problem with the government,” says Vidya Patil, the convenor of CREA in Raichur.

During multiple interviews, it becomes apparent that lack of quality education is a huge contributing factor to child labour.

Turning a blind eye

To tackle child labour, the government has formulated a Standard Operating Procedure for the enforcement of the Child Labour Act.

To the extent that the system works, it has rescued children, placing them in shelter homes. But an effective government response is thwarted by the absence of a strong monitoring and review mechanism.

For instance, the Labour Department says it has found 95 child labourers all over Karnataka between 2018-19, who were “processed” under the Child Labour Act. However, the number of child labour complaints received through Childline in Bengaluru for that year alone stands at 495; in Raichur, 450 complaints were registered that year.

The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016, also allows prosecution of people employing children, with up to two years in prison or a fine between Rs 20,000 - Rs 50,000.

In practice, convictions rarely take place. In Karnataka, some 49 cases were registered in different courts from April to October 2019, with penalties imposed in just eight cases, with Rs 2,40,000 collected in fines.

“In Karnataka, the penalisation is very poor. So there is no fear of the penalty. If there was consistent action against those indulging in child labour, we would see a decrease in such incidents,” said a child labour activist, who wished to remain anonymous. “If they [authorities] went about enforcing the child labour laws with the same fervour that they conduct elections, then the issue would get resolved in no time,” he says.

Bridge schools

Another government programme under the National Child Labour Project (NCLP), are ‘bridge schools’ for ‘mainstreaming’ those engaged in child labour. In Karnataka, 17 districts with a high incidence of child labour are supposed to have NCLP schools, but according to the Labour Department, only five districts have these schools (22).

Asked about this discrepancy, the Joint Labour Commissioner Dr S B Ravikumar said, “For opening an NCLP school, according to the guidelines, there has to be a minimum of 15 students, without which the Deputy Commissioner doesn’t give permission.”

Ravikumar says that because only children identified as child labourers by the Labour Department can be enrolled in these schools, the number remains low. “We act on child labour cases in addition to our daily work. Under the Act, ‘Section 17’ officers from 11 other government departments can conduct inspections but none of them do it. If these other departments aid us, the issue can be tackled effectively,” he says.

Kavita Ratna, Director, Advocacy, Concerned for the Working Children, says one of the drawbacks of the government’s response has been the lack of “safe work options” for adolescents, between 14 and 18 years of age.

For a lot of these children, Kavita says, “the solution lies in the villages they left behind.”

“Decentralisation is important because you are working with manageable numbers, say 30 - 40 students. At the local level, it’s possible to come up with unique, tailor-made responses,” she says.

One alternative, according to many educationists, is to set up good residential schools at the panchayat level so children complete their education.

“There is a concept that education is only for jobs… we need to break that. We need education for social development,” says Raghavendra Bhat.

Back at the shelter home, it is apparent that Aditya just wants to be done with the formality of formal education. “I don’t like school because they will put me in Class VII. I just want to write and pass my Class X exams, that’s enough,” he says.

Does he know that children below 14 years of age are not supposed to work at all?

“Yes. I knew this but I still worked, because I have to look after my mother.”