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Enforcing the ban

The ban on employing children in restaurants, roadside eateries, hotels, and tea shops or as domestic labour, announced by the Government in August, has recently come into effect. Those who violate the ban will be fined and also face a prison term up to two years. This is a welcome move focussing on areas where child labour is rampant and where the exploitation of children is shockingly high. Official estimates of child labour in India put the figure at 13 million although non-governmental organisations think it is about 60 million. The 2001 Census found about 185,000 children working as domestic labour and 70,000 working in restaurants and dhabas, but NGOs say that the number of children actually employed in these sectors is close to 20 million. The latest ban expands the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 by adding to the list of `hazardous' occupations in which children must not be employed. The existing legislation bars the employment of children only in certain occupations specified in the Act such as mining, chemical production, carpet weaving, bidi making, wool cleaning, and other processes where toxic substances are used. Child labour will persist in other areas, above all the agricultural sector where some 80 per cent of the working children can be found.

Meanwhile, to ensure that children do not work under conditions that have a deleterious impact on their health and development, multiple remedies need to be adopted. The law must be enforced stringently, with strong mechanisms for inspection and prosecution. Rescued children need special educational intervention to prepare them for regular schools. Going beyond this, India needs to do, as a top priority, what all developed, and many developing, countries have done — end the pernicious practice of child labour through ensuring, by law and in strict practice, that all children of school-going age are in school. The first stage of free and compulsory primary education, with the quality benchmarked, must apply immediately to the whole of India; and the more advanced States and Union Territories must aim higher than this. The near-term national goal must be to end all child labour, not just the employment of children in stipulated occupations.

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