“I was forced to work long hours and got Rs. 50 each week. I would be beaten up if I made a mistake, or if I asked to go back to my parents,” says 10-year-old Imtiyaz Ali who worked at a zari factory in South Delhi’s Khanpur area.
Imtiyaz added that he would get chapatti, and stale rice sometimes, to eat. Sometimes, he said, there was no breakfast.
“My employer told my parents over the phone that I was very happy and that I was studying a lot. I was never allowed to talk to them,” the child said.
Once when the police raided the factory, Imtiyaz’s employer asked him to pretend to be studying with his son. Once the police left, the boy was sent back to work.
Things took a turn for the better after another police raid. Imtiyaz and the other children at the factory were finally rescued.
“I am in Class VI now. My favourite subject is Math and I want to become an engineer,” Imtiyaz said.
Little change
It has been 14 years since June 12 was declared ‘World Day Against Child Labour’. But in India, as many as 65 per cent children suffer from poor health; while 40 per cent are child labourers.
Add to this the fact that each child labourer has experienced abuse and exploitation at least once, and that girl children endure far more deprivation than boys.
Further, it has been six years since the Right To Education Act was passed. Yet, majority of these children are school drop-outs, while there are others who never enrolled.
One visit to the fringes of the Capital is enough to witness how this unorganised sector operates, how the laws protecting children are blatantly violated. Here, a large number of migrant families — including women and children — are recruited by labour agents and employed in brick kilns, construction sites, stone crushing and laying of roads and pipelines.
According to the ‘Young Lives at Work Sites’ study conducted by NGO Aide et Action and the Bernard Van Leer Foundation (BvLF), brick-making units absorb the maximum number of child labourers in the country.
“Out of every five bricks, two are made by children accompanying their parents who migrate in search of livelihood. The debt or the advance migrant labourers borrow from the middlemen is paid back not by working, but by involving their children in work sites,” says Umi Daniel, Regional Head (Migration), Aide et Action, South Asia.
In fact, work at a brick kiln is designed in a way that needs all members of the family to participate.
Children at these sites are made to walk on the newly-made bricks, which are laid out to dry, in order to check their consistency.
The study on the status and condition of young migrants living at worksites in Delhi, Chennai, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Jaipur, Patna, Hyderabad and Guwahati portrays a very grim picture of the children engaged here.
A mammoth 90 per cent of seasonal migrant children are excluded from accessing the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), while 80 per cent of children in the school-going age do not access education near work sites.
Except Hyderabad, almost all the children at work sites do not benefit from anganwadis.
Governments in the other seven States are yet to extend the ICDS services to cater to the needs of the intra or inter-State migrants and their families.
The study, which was conducted in 2013, says that children between the ages of 6 to 14 years comprise half of the total child labour population.
Talking about the level of education of these children, Mr. Daniel says: “Most school enrolments happen at the village of origin. The number of children who continue to study at the destination decreases substantially. On the other hand, 39 per cent of the total child labour population in the age group of 6 to 14 years never enrolled in any school, neither at the source nor the destination.”
