Amid heated debate over bringing back unwarranted money stashed abroad, a child rights outfit has claimed that child labour generates Rs.1.2-lakh crore of black money every year in India.
According to a report ‘Capital Corruption: Child Labour in India,' prepared by the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), the figure was arrived at by calculating the number of child labourers, the income earned by them and the illicit profits being generated by employers by not appointing adult workers.
“The greed for maximisation of profit fuels the demand for child labour, with children as the cheapest form of labour. Child labour, corruption and flow of black money, fuel and sustain each other in an illicit nexus that only profits the employers and the middlemen,” the study said.
There are around six crore child labourers in the country who work for approximately 200 days in a year on an average cost of Rs.15 per child a day, the study says.
“The amount so calculated is Rs.18,000 crore in a year. Now, if these six crore child labourers can be substituted with the six crore adults with an average floor wage of Rs.115 a day, a sum of Rs.1,38,000 crore will have to paid. The difference between these two figures amounts to Rs.1.20-lakh crore,” the study claimed.
It said that this amount would have been paid by the employers to the workers but they employed children who were underpaid and overworked. “The employers also did not report any income to the government, evade taxes, making Rs.1.2-lakh crore illegal money in the country,” it said.
