New Delhi: A veritable crisis looms in the horizon with the COVID-19 crisis pushing millions of vulnerable children into child labour with the threat biggest for the children of migrant workers who started walking back to their villages, deprived of food and wages and are left with no options but to engage in under-age labour.
According to the last Census, there are more than 10 million child labourers in India, with many are kept confined to the workplace by employers.
“We are witnessing reverse migration where people are scared to be in different cities due to the pandemic, health condition and zero economic opportunities. The children among migrant workers are going back to places where resources are very limited, perhaps the reason for which they migrated to bigger cities. However, the additional pressure on the families without work will force children and women to bear the brunt,” Enakshi Ganguly, advisor of HAQ-Centre for Child Rights, told ETV Bharat.
“Many daily wage earners in the cities use to send their children to schools and given the current situation, these children are pulled out of school and they are deprived of education in the villages. Once a child is detached from education for longer, there is a very little chance for them to go back to school especially in villages. This will push them to work.”
“Families will become indigent and will be left with no choice but to push children to child labour and any other activities which would bring income to their families,” Ganguly points out.
According to a World Bank report, the nationwide lockdown in India has impacted nearly 40 million internal migrants. Around 50,000-60,000 moved from urban centres to rural areas.
Significantly, the ILO has pointed out that there are about 152 million children globally engaged in child labour, 72 million of whom are in hazardous work.
“We have created a pandemic of poverty. The girl child has to stay back home taking care of the younger ones, while parents are out for work, so there is no way that a girl child will acquire education in the coming days. In the last 35 years, the nation has witnessed certain improvement in the scenario of child labour with access to education and awareness, but due to the pandemic, there has been a major setback especially because of the unplanned return of the migrants. I could foresee a much higher case of child labour amid the crisis,” she adds
“There should be an immediate survey in the panchayat or the village level as to how many children are there or how many new have come and how many have to be accommodated in Anganwadi centres or schools. This is the need of the hour. Everything is unprecedented and we should know how many children need mid-day meal in the villages to ensure that they don’t suffer from malnutrition. We have to start putting money in the pockets of the poor,” Ganguly says.
Meanwhile, co-founder and executive director of HAQ, Bharti Ali, underlines that the unemployment among the adults has already been very high and during the crisis, when the industrialists will be trying to cut down the cost of goods, they will find difficult to hire labourers at higher wages, automatically children of the migrant workers will become an option then, as lot of industries run through supply chains.
“Children who are not meant to be in factories probably will end up working there to support their families because the lockdown has resulted in the loss of their parent's income,” she says.
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