Greed drives child exploitation in India, says Nobel prize winner

Kailash Satyarthi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and child labour activist, talks to The National about the situation in India.

Can you tell us a bit about child labour in India and the factors behind this?

India not only has the largest number of child labourers in the world, but we also have the worst forms of child labour, including slavery, trafficking and the use of children in hazardous occupations. All these things are prevalent in India. Children are the cheapest source of labour and they cannot form unions and go to the court of law, and cannot challenge their exploitation. Sometimes they are even forced to stay at workplaces at night and are confined in factories and mines. It’s the employers’ greed that must find the cheapest form of labour. Acute poverty, illiteracy and ignorance, the failure of welfare schemes and education systems – the combination of these factors is responsible for the perpetuation of child labour.

How to you feel about the recently passed child labour prevention and regulation bill?

I am badly disappointed with that because it’s a regressive law. The two serious lacunas are the decrease in [the number of listed] hazardous occupations, and that the law blurs the line between helping and learning in the family and the exploitation of children in family enterprises. A child as young as six years old could go to work in a slaughterhouse, or would be allowed to go along with her mother as domestic help because the employer can claim that he is not employing the child, but the child is helping the family.

What should India be doing to address this problem?

Well, there has to be a good law. Much more important is the public perception, which requires some sort of mobilisation or mass movement, where people realise that child labour is evil and we cannot tolerate it.

But is child labour essential to the survival of many impoverished families in India?

There is a myth that children supplement the family income or child labour is necessary for many families because of socio-economic reasons. These are myths that are propagated by employers. We live in a world that is globalised and driven by a knowledge economy, and child labour is the biggest impediment of education, and without education they cannot escape poverty.

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