Ending child labor tricky job for India: In a nation where tens of millions of kids work, employing those as young as 5 is legal—and a key source of family income
In Bangalore, India Rajeshwari spent her childhood trailing her mother on Bangalore's streets, helping her sift through roadside trash for recyclables. Now 15, she's still working, currently as a night dishwasher for a company catering wedding parties. Like many of the tens of millions of child laborers in India—plenty of whose labor ends up in exports to the United States—she sees holding down a job less as a violation of her human rights than as a simple reality of life. She doesn’t do this work because she wants to, but feels that she has to for survival.
Stamping out child labor is a tricky business for India's government. As officials try to modernize both India's economy and its image, they aim to cut back on a practice that much of the world sees as abhorrent. But in a nation where tens of millions of kids work, children's labor is not just a key source of financial support for families, it is legal. The government over the last year and a half has put more jobs off-limits for kids, staged raids on factory sweatshops and pushed children nabbed at work back in school. But children's advocates say the campaign may not do much to better the lives of many kids. Under Indian law, children under 14 are free to work as long as the job isn't deemed "hazardous.”
This is going to be a very tough task at hand for the Indian government but it appears that they are taking the right steps. Obviously the government isn’t going to be able to go in an fix everything immediately, so at least they are going in and trying to get children out of these hazardous jobs with the raids of sweatshops and trying to get them back into school.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-child-labor_goeringapr18,1,6786310.story?track=rss
1 comment:
Hopefully they are attacking the problem of poverty rather than simply cracking down on working kids and their families. Otherwise one cannot see how these laws will have any lasting effect. These children will simply return to work once the officials have gone, in order that they and their families may survive.
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