New Delhi, June 12
The neon lights at India Habitat Centre’s posh Jacaranda Hall did daze 18-year-old Swarupa a bit. For her, it was the first visit outside of Chitlaya, a tiny hamlet in Andhra Pradesh’s Ranga Reddy district where light and water don’t come easy, and poverty rules.
It was to fight this poverty that Swarupa, since she was 12, spent days and nights labouring in the cottonseed farms at her village inhaling dangerous chemicals sprayed to improve seed quality. Never mind her childhood was being robbed of quality in the process.
“Those were the days of abject struggle, but I was determined to move out of the fields and into school,” said the former child worker who was today the Government of India’s special guest on the occasion of the World Day against Child Labour. She defied destiny to become an operator with telecommunications giant Idea Cellular back home.
No wonder among top representatives from the ministries, UNICEF and the ILO, Swarupa stood the tallest, showing the way forward for the 12.7 million child workers of India which still houses the largest population of child labourers in the world.
At the end of the day, Swarupa added weight to the long-held view that education is the only and the right response to child labour.
“I was 12 when my father put me in the farms to work under the sun, sometimes for 18 hours a day. He wanted me to bring money. After the farms, I used to go to the employer’s house to weed cotton for another two hours. For all this, I got Rs 15 a day,” Swarupa said. She was bonded into labour as the employers paid advance to her family.
Finally, one day, she did the unthinkable. Without seeking her father’s permission, she joined the educational camp organised in the village by the MVF Foundation. “My father was mad at me, but eventually he understood what I was fighting for. I was only asking for my rightful space in the sun,” Swarupa said, sprinkling hope all around for those still trapped in tough situations.
The gathering hailed her courage and called for treating violation of a child’s right to education as a violation of human rights. “We still have 12.7 million economically active children between 5 and 14 years. Children in workforce have increased from 11.3 million recorded in 2001,” Shanta Sinha, chairperson, National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) told The Tribune.
She said Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar topped the charts of child labour. For her part, women and child development minister Renuka Choudhury supported NCPCR’s stand and said states would be made accountable for violation of child rights.
The activists, led by Babu Mathew, country director, Action Aid, also demanded repeal of chapter 3 of the Child Labour Prohibition Act which deals with regulation of child labour. “You can’t both regulate and prohibit child labour. Abolition is the only right option,” he said.
