Karnataka - Belgaum   

They are forced to work for a living

Vijaykumar Patil

TIME TO WORK: Young children helping their parents dig trenches in Belgaum.

Belgaum: Despite the Child Labour (Abolition & Regulation) Act, 1986, which prohibits the employment of children below 14 years of age, the issue of child labour is a complex one related to poverty and the lack of a social security network.

Nine-year-old Nagalaxmi, her brother Seenu, 8, and sister Charvatamma, 11, who have temporarily migrated here along with their parents from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, are engaged in digging trenches. The parents, Gurvayya and his wife, Ravana, have been hired by a contractor to dig roadside trenches to lay cables for a private phone service company. They are helped by their children.

Gurvayya says wages are not paid for a day's work but for the amount of work done — Rs. 30 for digging a trench a metre long, one foot wide and one foot deep. So, if everybody in the family works, the earnings for the day will be more. The children do about 25 to 30 per cent of the work. "I am helpless. We have no alternative source of income and the family cannot survive only on the wages earned by me and my wife."

Gurvayya's family is not the only on digging trenches along with their children. There are several families from the neighbouring State on the job. Poverty has forced them to leave their villages and come here. If they were not poor, they would not have asked their children to do such hard work, they say.

Children like Nagalaxmi and Seenu should be in school, but poverty has forced them to become child labourers. Their parents are not aware about child labour laws. Both the Labour Department and Department of Women and Child Development are unaware of such young children being put to work in the heart of the city for about a week now.

When contacted, the Deputy Director of the Department of Women and Child Development, K.H. Obalappa, who along with officials from various departments, is a member of the district-level task force committee for the prevention of child labour, said on Tuesday that he will take up the matter with the Labour Department.

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