Jharkhand plans to name & shame child labour employers

NAMES OF OFFENDERS WILL BE PUBLISHED IN NEWSPAPERS AND ON GOVT WEBSITE TO PUBLICLY SHAME THEM

RANCHI: The Jharkhand government will name and shame people employing children, attempting to check a rampant practice that many offenders hardly consider an offence and rather believe they are doing the poor child a favour.

A new central law bans child labourunder14,butpeoplestillhire underage workers in agriculture, mining, manufacturing — such as embroidering clothes, weaving carpets — and restaurants and shops, and as domestic help.

The law stiffened penalties for employers, doubling jail terms to two years and increasing fines from `20,000 to `50,000.

The Jharkhand government has added another deterrent to the legal action that offenders face for employing child labour.

The names of offenders would be published in newspapers to publicly shame them, state labour minister Raj Paliwal said on Thursday.

Public humiliation, he thought, would work because most people employing child labour in urban areas are from reputed backgrounds, holding respectable designations.

“We are also planning to upload their names on our website,” Paliwal said.

The proposal was mooted after children working in the households of two government employees — a CID cop and a block development officer — were rescued in the past two months.

The majority of people encouraging child labour in Jharkhand don’t consider it a crime.

They feel they are doing a favour to the poor kid by giving him a job, child rights campaigners said. Likewise, most people ignore child labour in their neighbourhood, considering it a minor offence.

“Naming offenders in newspapers and on public and social media platforms will discourage people intending to hire kids or those who already employ children but aren’t caught,” labour deputy commissioner Prabhat Kumar said.

The practice continues because of a steady supply of cheap child labour from the poverty-stricken countryside to meet the middleclass families’ demand for helps to cook, clean and look after their children. According to the child labour commission, there are at least 500,000 children employed across the state. Of them, around 200,000 are from neighbouring Bihar and West Bengal — the majority victims of human trafficking. The labour department has since August 1 rescued over 250 children from households, brick kilns, hotels and factories in Jharkhand, labour commissioner Pravin Toppo revealed.

A 2015 report by the International Labour Organization (IL O) put the number of child workers in India aged five to 17 at 5.7 million, out of 168 million globally.