Our children, their children

Making children work for us is in our blood. We are, therefore, oblivious to children working. We see them working everywhere but do not see them.

Untold generations of middle- and upper-middle-class Indians have grown up believing that it was our right to have children work for us. Not our children of course, whom we diligently sent to the best schools that our money can buy but their children, the children of the poor and the vulnerable.

When I was young, there were children working in my house. It seemed like most natural thing to be. As natural as I would wake up in the morning, bathe, dress, breakfast and go to school. And even today children are working in our homes, in our fields and factories, in kirana shops and sweet shops, everywhere. We strongly believe that it is very important to give our children the best of education possible and equally believe that the children of the poor and the marginalised need not go to schools but should instead be working. The logic for this dichotomy sounds very reasonable; 'If those poor children don't work, how will their poor parents be able to feed them?'

This attitude permeates not merely our homes, villages, towns and cities, but the decision and policy-making bodies of our Mantralayas in Delhi.

Working for the ILO on the elimination of child labour in India in the mid-90s, the greatest wall I had to surmount in efforts to end child labour and promote schooling for the children of the poor and the marginalised, was this final question at the end of a long discussion —where I would be at my persuasive best with one argument after another showing why child labour should end, 'Joseph, we agree with you fully. But tell me, if those poor children don't work, how will their families eat and live?' How would you feel if, after having related the story of the Ramayana in great detail to someone, the listener at the end of it all asks you, 'but who did you say Sita was? Did you say she was Lord Ram's sister?

Even though things have changed, albeit slowly, from those 90s, yet our policymakers still find it difficult to envisage a system of free and universal quality education for the children of the poor. They cannot countenance truancy laws that would deter parents from keeping their children away from school. The punishment that our laws mete out for those who employ children as young as 8 or 9 is laughable. Our laws on child labour are weak. And even these laws are hardly ever applied. Or if applied, never ever is an employer prosecuted. And if ever prosecuted, no employer is found guilty and punished.

I worked for nearly 6 years as Labour Commissioner in a highly progressive state like Kerala and yet found it difficult to obtain a conviction for even a minor offence for an employer violating child labour laws. Either my own officials swell with pity for the erring employer, and if I overcome that with threats of punishment and suspension, the prosecutor's office and the government pleader think this is too trivial a case to peruse (or perhaps feels a tinge of conscience since he may himself be employing children), and if I pass that hurdle, the Judge feels that perhaps all that is required is a severe warning to the erring employer.

We have yet to understand the tremendous harm we are bringing down on ourselves by not discouraging child labour quickly enough. Even international pressure fails to swing our policymakers to align national laws with international standards and Conventions that India itself voted for. Thus, for many decades, India consistently refused to ratify two very important ILO conventions on child labour that would have ensured that Indian children had a better deal in their childhood.

On July 12, 2017, I was a witness in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, where the UN offices are located, to the then Labour Minister, Bandaru Dattatreya, exchanging the Instrument of Ratification by India of two very important ILO Conventions on Child Labour with Guy Rider, the Director General of the ILO.

These two Conventions were the Minimum Age Convention Number 138 which the ILO had adopted half a century ago in 1973, and Convention No. 182 on the Immediate Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour that had been unanimously adopted in 1997 by all the 191 countries of the ILO, including India. It had taken India over 5 decades of relentless pressure domestically and internationally to ratify the first Convention and two decades to ratify that second Convention of eliminating the Worst Forms of Child Labour.

India has a Nobel Peace Laureate, Kailash Satyarthi, who won it for his global work on ending child labour. India has also been observing the World Day Against Child Labour religiously every year since it was first instituted in 2002. But to no avail; India continues to delay policy initiatives against child labour and delay putting in place stringent laws to discourage and end child labour. Thus, even today, India continues to have the highest numbers of child labourer in the world. Shame! While these numbers have declined significantly in the more socially progressive states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, etc., and is declining in the other southern states, it continues to be significant in the north, especially in the Hindi belt.

Child labour has always been an ambivalent area for India's policymakers. They dragged their feet on the ratification of the C. 138 for nearly 50 years and C. 182 for nearly two decades. Living in a milieu that derives advantage from children's work, in fields, factories, shops and homes, the economic, political and administrative aristocracy of the country continue to spread the lie that child labour is necessary and beneficial economically to its victim, the child and to the child's family, community, state and nation. There can be no greater fallacy than this deceit. Child labour is very harmful economically for the child as well as in every other respect, be it its impact on the child's health, growth, education, confidence, psyche, skills, etc. It is not only bad for the child but it is also bad for its family, the community, village, state and the country.

Two decades ago when I was in the ILO directing its International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour IPEC in India, I made a cost-benefit analysis for a child who is put to work at an early age and consequently being deprived of education, and comparing it to another child who had 10 years of schooling before going to work. I made the calculation in the mid 1990s taking the case of a child born say in the year 1990 and sent to work at the young age of 8 or 10 and comparing the income that such a child would earn over its entire lifetime with the case of another child from the same social and economic background, whose parents sent the child to school and after completing his 10th Grade sent him to work. The excess of benefits to costs for the latter child who went to school worked out – then, in the 1990s - to about Rs 50 lakh per child sent to work. Today that cost could be over 10 times that amount.

If we are to multiply the cost per child with the number of children working in the country today, the total cost to the country will run into many trillions of rupees. This is the economic cost that the country is paying for child labour. The earlier we realise that, and put in place strong unequivocal laws to end child labour and send the children of the poor, marginalised and vulnerable to school, and take uncompromising efforts to put in place stringent laws against truancy and against those who employ children, and take effective steps to implement the laws and punish those who transgress them, the quicker India will progress to the digital age, that Acche Din that we have been dreaming about for some time now.

Remember, child labour constitutes a vicious cycle. If a family is poor and therefore sends its child to work instead of school, then the child grows up to be poor as an adult because being uneducated and without the necessary human resource, its earnings as an adult would continue to be marginal. The child as an adult would continue to be poor. And since the child is now a grown adult and is poor, he sends his children to work by the same logic. And the cycle of poverty and child labour continues, one feeding on the other.

If India is still a country with crores of poor, it is because we do not send our children to schools. For today, the wealth of modern nations is its human resource. And child labour depresses a nation's human resource and therefore, its wealth. But more about that in another article.

(The author is a former Indian and UN Civil Servant. He belongs to the 1978 batch of the IAS and worked with ILO in India and abroad for 20 years. The views expressed are strictly personal)