The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Rescuing child labourers from homes and hotels

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 10, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Rescuing child labourers from homes and hotels

Ramya Kannan

Special schools and residential camps play a role in bringing them into mainstream

CHENNAI: Probably the most demonstrable aspect of the State Government’s drive to eradicate child labour in Chennai is its action plan to rescue children from domestic labour and from hotel and catering establishments.

While non-governmental organisations active in the field have been crying hoarse about the pernicious practice of employing child labourers in homes and in hotels, pointing out to the various tortures that the children are exposed to under such circumstances, it took a Central Government’s notification to actually do something about it. The Centre clamped a total ban on the employment of children as domestic labourers, making a legal provision to punish anyone who employs children under 14 at home with two years’ imprisonment.

State Governments got into the act. Tamil Nadu came up with an action plan to identify, rescue and rehabilitate children employed in the hospitality and domestic sectors, according to Labour Secretary R. K. Khanna. Significantly, the Labour Department also planned mega awareness-building campaigns, both at the State- and district-levels.

But the greatest strength of the plan was to conduct raids on homes to rescue children. On receipt of a call that a child has been involved in labour, a team from the Labour Department rushes to the spot and conducts a raid on the premises to establish if a child has been put to work there. The task that follows next is to take the child out of the home and ensure that he or she has a chance to get a non-formal education or even formal education in schools, if they are qualified.

In this, the already existing mechanism in the State came to the aid of the Labour Department — special schools run by the National Child Labour Projects/INDUS projects and residential camps run by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan project.

In addition, the State made other specific plans to target domestic child labourers.

Flat owners associations have been instructed to submit certificates to declare that no children are employed on their campuses. The Director of School Education was instructed to obtain similar certificates from children studying in Matriculation and CBSE schools.

Field workers involved in rescuing the children indicate that the biggest challenge is to establish the age of the child rescued.

With the employer, child worker and his/her parents insisting that the child is over 14 years, it often becomes difficult to establish that the worker is indeed a child. Doctors only indicate the rough age of the child, after physical examination.

And often, legally, it is impossible to prove such a case and the violator escapes conviction.

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