Child labour: The inconvenient truth behind India’s economic growth story
NEW DELHI: Seventy years ago last week, India gained independence. The country has since created one of the world’s largest economies. But despite its wealth, 33 million children from ages five to 18 are working - and almost one third of this group are under 15 according to Save the Children India, making India home to one of the highest concentrations of child workers in the world.
Economic theory suggests that child labour would be all but eradicated by growth and development. But after some successful efforts to increase the number of children in school and to rehabilitate former child workers, the national effort to eliminate the practice is losing momentum and child labour in major cities has increased significantly, according to interviews with more than a dozen child rights groups, academics and international organisations.
“People have dropped the ball,” said Joachim Theis, Unicef India’s Child Protection Chief from 2013 to 2016. Child labour “is being seen as something which is too difficult” to stop.
Since the election of the pro-growth prime minister, Narendra Modi, in 2014, India has implemented ambitious reforms aimed at deregulating and growing its economy. Under his watch, the country at one point overtook China as the world’s fastest growing economy (although it ceded this position earlier this year), and is predicted to average an impressive real GDP growth of 7.4 per cent this year and next, says a report this month from Deutsche Bank.
But the nation’s development has been segmented, and much of it has not impacted the areas of the economy where children tend to work. “India’s GDP and growth is largely oriented around a highly educated and highly skilled workforce,” said Rajeev Dehejia, professor of public policy at New York University. “This is paradoxical for an economy where most people have a low level of education.”
Conversely, most child labour is concentrated away from the skilled economy, in the informal sector that makes up about 90 per cent of India’s workforce and half of its GDP, according to Credit Suisse estimates. Here, children are not subject to government inspections, legal protections or minimum wage requirements. Such industries include agriculture, small factories for carpets and clothing, brick kilns and domestic staffing.
“It is very under the table,” said Nina Smith, chief executive of GoodWeave International, which works against child labour in global supply chains. “There is a huge workforce that is unregulated, does not really benefit from labour laws, and is highly vulnerable to exploitation.”
The Indian government says that there has been a decline of 45 per cent between 2005 and 2010. But most child rights groups give a more conservative estimate, as government figures do not include all children or all parts of the informal economy.
Some suggest that child labour rates have plateaued in the years since the last census, but with no new national count and the definition of child labour constantly changing, the exact number is unknown. It is a challenge to generate precise figures because of the covert nature of the practice; many children are kept in hidden workplaces, such as employers’ homes and small-scale factories.
Puja Marwaha, chief executive of Child Rights and You, a major Indian non-governmental organisation, said that child labour has redistributed as children have migrated to large cities like Mumbai and Delhi in search of work. To bolster her case, she cites government data showing a 60 per cent increase in the number of children working in Mumbai in the decade leading up to the most recent census in 2011.
Mumbai is not the only case of children moving to cities for work. Across the country as a whole during this period, there was a 54 per cent increase in urban areas in children aged five to 14 who are working, Unicef figures show. (There was also a 27 per cent decrease in rural areas, where most underage work is concentrated.) Since the 1930s, numerous laws have been introduced banning child work and encouraging education in the country. A 2009 act requiring all children between the ages of six and 14 to attend school is one example. — WP-Bloomberg