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The CLA, though prohibits child (up to 14 years) labour in specified hazardous occupations (17) and processes (57) that hardly cover 10 per cent child labour, exempts household workshops and training centres altogether. With the shifting of production processes from industrial premises to homes and due to poor implementation of the law, child labour continues to thrive even in specified hazardous processes such as diamond cutting, gem polishing, carpet weaving and so on. Article 24 thus stands violated.

By legalising child labour in other jobs, the CLA in fact promotes large scale recruitment of children as young as seven years old to be taken to far off places for work at the cost of formal education. It provides legal sanction to dropouts. Recent reports in the media about recruitment of tens of thousands of children from the tribal belt of southern Rajasthan for work on cotton fields of Gujarat for Bt cottonseed production are testimony to this. The CLA thus violates Articles 21A.

That the CLA legitimises and promotes child labour reflects in two successive censuses. The number of workers in the age group 5-14 increased from 11.3 million in 1991 to 12.7 million in 2001. As per the latest (2004-05) NSSO data, the size of the child ‘labour pool’ (out-of-school children) is to the tune of 45.2 millions, nearly 18 per cent of the total children in the age group 5-14. Thus, almost every fifth child in India stands deprived of the fundamental right to education. No wonder India continues to house the largest number of child labourers in the world.

The Act has failed to protect rights of the young working hands because it was based on wrong premises of justifying and legalising child labour on account of passing ‘traditional craft’ and ‘harsh social reality.’ The CLA and the child labour policy of 1987 are not located in the inseparable processes of child labour and universalisation of primary education but in the Hindu hierarchical mindset.

The majority instances of child labour belong to historically serving communities of STs, SCs, OBCs or Muslims. The concept of ‘craft’ and ‘informal education’ emanates from a biased distinction made, as observed by Prof Weiner, “between children as ‘hands’ and children as ‘minds’; that is, between the child who must be taught to ‘work’ and the child who must be taught to ‘learn’, the acquisition of manual skills as distinctive from cognitive skills.” The manual skills are considered essential for the children of the poor and marginalised placed lowest in the Hindu hierarchy.

The ‘harsh reality’ argument is unsustainable because (a) India is among top 10 economies growing at a high rate, (b) NREGA has been in operation and will cover entire India, and (c) evidence increasingly shows that child labour neither moves a household out of poverty (it only transfers poverty from one generation to another) nor is it related with poverty.

Indeed, no country can achieve sustainable development by denying opportunities to millions of children. Moreover in a globalising world, international labour standards can be overlooked only at the cost of development. Exports may be hit adversely on account of child labour use.

The polity and the enlightened citizenry must take a wake up call and the CLA should be replaced with a comprehensive law to universalise free and compulsory equal school education with adequate provisions to ensure that there is no interference in the formal education of any child up to the secondary level.

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