How severe is the child labour issue in India?
It is estimated that one-third of the world’s working children are in India. It means that nearly 50 per cent of the children in this country are deprived of their right to childhood and destined to end up as illiterate workers with no opportunity to fulfil their true potential. Is it not true that poor families need their children’s income for survival? This is the classic ‘poverty argument’. The tragedy of the child labour situation in this country is that it is simply assumed that every child labourer is working because it is an issue of survival for the family. This is the most insidious aspect of this dubious argument. In rural areas there are full of examples of children belonging to very poor families who are in school and are relatively better than their counterparts who are working. A large number of factors such as tradition, ignorance of parents on account of illiteracy, lack of access to alternatives and insensitive administration have nothing to do with the economics that
