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`Chotus' back at workplace

Staff Reporter

Photo: Ashoke Chakrabarty

REALITY BITES: A boy washing plates at a roadside food stall in the railway station area in Bhubaneswar.

BHUBANESWAR: Shankar passed out Class VI when family burden fell on him. The boy from Berhampur came to the capital city to work in a roadside eatery in 2005. Though he cannot be more than 13 years old, if anyone asks about his age, pat comes the reply - 18.

Naresh was only 10 years old when he found himself a burden on his parents as five sisters were to be married off. He left Narasinghpur and landed in the city to don the role of a waiter in a dhaba. Any enquiry about the boy in an eatery near Acharya Vihar Square would lead to a haste response from the owner, "Naresh is my nephew."

Lying low for more than four months, the army of child labourers is back in the city. This time, both child labourers and their employers have evolved several noble explanations to dodge law enforcers and escape from punitive action in the wake of the ban on employing children below the age of 14 at homes, hotels and restaurants.

Family relations

In due course, `chotus', the name often used to call child labourers at workplace, have become adults while several poor children have discovered their never-existing family relations. They are either employed in an eatery, teashops or as domestic help.

While the ban is used as a tool to put one's rival in trouble, the concerted effort by the government to address the crisis is largely absent.

This is because the ban was imposed without ensuring rehabilitation of child labourers.

`More to be done'

"The ban should have come along with a rehabilitation plan. The government cannot get the desired result unless the law is replaced by a fresh regulation bearing pragmatic approach," says Ranjan Mohanty, National Convenor, Campaign Against Child Labour. He claims that the State has more than 40 lakh child labourers of whom some 23 lakhs were girls.

Admits Commissioner-cum-Secretary of Labour and Employment Benudhar Mishra: "Releasing child labourers from hazardous or non-hazardous places should not be construed that the job is over. A proper rehabilitation programme should have followed it."

The department has already prepared a detailed action plan to put rescued children in schools with free accommodation and to cover their families under different welfare programmes, he says.

"The action plan will be cleared at a high-level committee headed by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik," he adds.

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