As the government takes a tough stride to ban employment of children as domestic servants and in dhabas, restaurants and resorts with the promise to rehabilitate, Kriti Attri explores the plight of Child labour, a reality which screams at the face of humanity every moment.
Every day we see those faces, those eyes, those small hands reaching out to us, reminding us that still a lot have to be done to get rid of it from our nation. The future of the nation, the blessings of divine begs on the roads signals, works in dhabas, at home as servants, in factories for the lively hood.
Denied of a sound education and a normal childhood, some children are confined, brutally beaten and ultimately reduced to slavery. Some are denied freedom of movement?the right to leave the workplace and go home to their families. Some are abducted and forced to work.
Child labor or labour is the employment of children under an age determined by law or custom. This practice is considered exploitive by many international organizations, such as the United Nations,and the International Labour Organization, with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that:
States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) about 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen are working in developing countries?at least 120 million on a full time basis. Around sixty-one percent of these are in Asia, 32 percent in Africa, and 7 percent in Latin America.