Journal #2

Alyssa Massman                   

"Child Labour: Determinants, Dimensions and Policies in India"

          This article is about child labor and child labor laws in India. The article starts by addressing what child labor is, defining it as “used for employment of children below a certain age, which is considered illegal by law and custom. The stipulated age varies from country to country. Child labour is made by any working child who is under the age specified by law. The word "work" means full time commercial work to sustain self or add to the family income. Broadly any child who is employed in activities to feed self and family is being subjected to child labour.” It presents that India is by far the country with the most child laborers, followed by Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Laka. India alone contributes one-fourth of the world’s child labor. The major cities in India that contribute to this are “Uttar Pradesh followed by West Bengal, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh and Assam.” The article explicitly indicates that extreme poverty is the reason/cause of children being sent out into the work place. The article also identifies others reasons, “. But there are other reasons as well such as population explosion, cheap child labour, insufficiency of compulsory education at the primary level, parental ignorance regarding the bad effects of child labour, the ineffectiveness of child labour laws in terms of implementation, no availability and non-accessibility of schools, boring and unpractical school curriculum which encourages the phenomenon of child labour.” The article goes on to mention that child labor does indeed produce skilled workers but it keeps them in low paying jobs which perpetuates poverty. Some programs have been put into place: “Indo-Us Child Labour Project (INDUS): this project is developed by Government of India and US Department of Labour under ILO's IPEC for prevention and elimination of child labour in identified hazardous sector of India.”

            In one way this article addresses what precisely child labor globally is considered. In my previous article I had noticed no definition as to what is considered child labor and bondage exclusively in India or worldly. This article agrees with the previous article, “Child Slavery: India’s Self-Perpetuating Dilemma.” They both made claims that child labor is directly connected to the problem of poverty. They also both make vague claims of trying to improve upon child labor and poverty. This article does provide more information in the regards to education and age-appropriate jobs for children which would help lower the number of child laborers.

            This article added to my thoughts and gave me more things to ponder about the issue of child labor. The first thing that I really noticed was the point made that child labor is evident in all countries/cultures but the visibility and severity is based primarily in the countries socio-economic status. This article showed in India that the numbers of child laborers working has decreased since 1993. That shows promise that India’s new policies and programs instituted to help educate and provide ethical jobs for children are working. From this article I have learned more about the status of the Indian Government and seen the strides that they have tried to take. This helps me understand the modern viewpoint about child laborers in India. A new viewpoint that comes to mind is that the government is trying to lessen this issue with implanting programs and that mainly the issue is to be blamed on the lack of resources and illiteracy and ignorance from children and parents. I do not say this to attack those who are less fortunate and living in poverty because resource availability and location do matter in gauging the economic status of people. I’m starting to realize that resource availability can be a huge limiting factor to families which can force child labor. I’m also lead to the idea that this problem can only be fixed from within the country and that will come at a large cost from the government to improve education and employment of adults.

            Now that I see that the government of India has implanted successful programs, I need to look deeper at cultural affects. I need to uncover why culturally this evolved into millions of children. There are many more cultural questions I need to answer. A new question brought to my mind is what is the education system like in India? Do they have public schools? Are children required to go to school until a certain age? Now that this article has more clearly connected education as an importance and perpetuating factor of poverty I am intrigued to see how much schooling an average child laborer receives in their lifetime. My next step will be research cultural matters more deeply than the previous articles. I then will look at more factors of the perpetuation including education. 

Kumar, Ganesh. "Child Labour: Determinants, Dimensions And Policies In India." Economic Affairs 58.4 (2013): 417-429. EconLit. Web. 6 Oct. 2014.