View of CHILD LABOUR : A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

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ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in Vol.03, Issue 03, March 2018, ISSN -2456-1037 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL) UGC APPROVED NO. 48767

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CHILD LABOUR : A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

DR. MANOJ KUMAR Asst. Prof. (Sociology) R.B.A. Govt. Degree College,

Gajraula, Amroha

Child laboir is universal phenomenon. While there is no accurate accounting of how many of the world‟s children contribute to their families or their own economic support, the number of working children is surely in the hundreds of millions globally.With the advent of modern industrial system there came a tendency among the employers to earn easy and quick profits at less expenses. That is why, the employment of children in factories at low rate of remuneration became the frequent practice. They had to work for excessive hours under unhealthy, terrible and hazardous conditions. Child labour is both an economic and social problem. The term child labour brings before the eyes, picture of exploitation of little, weak, tender and underdeveloped bodies, illiteracy, physical abuse in the term of beatings by employers and accident often fatal at work sites. The problem with child labour is that it can hardly be legislated away as its roots lie in abject poverty . Where social and economic condition have improved children go to school and child labour for virtually disappeared. So any society which wants its children to be free to learn and play, first free entire population from fear of wants. This means ensuring basic human needs of all people .

A child labour is differentiated from an adult worker on the basis of age, usually a child worker is someone below the age of 14 or 15 years . Who is involved in any productive activity whether paid or unpaid, with the family or outside . Children are involved in all types of work. They work in agricultural activities , looking after cattle and sheep, Scaring away birds from the fields, Helping at the time of sowing and harvesting. In their homes, they look after the younger siblings, collect fire woods and water, and participate in other domestic and non-domestic work as in a cottage industry. In the urban sector, they work in a wide variety of activities from organized factories to roadside cafe, motor repairing workshops, street vending, shoe-shining, selling of news papers, fruits and peanuts, domestic help in homes and even in organized beggary. Parent put their children to work at a very early age , sometimes when they are only 6-7 years old.A large percentage of children start working because of being orphaned, rejected by parents or because of broken families and other domestic problems. These children go into the street totally abandoned with no to care for them. They have no option but to take to work for then bare survival. It is in these unfortunate circumstances that young girls are drawn into prostitution and young boys and girls have been forced into organized beggary.

Normally, the child who works in a family undertaking, whether in agriculture, manufacturing, commerce or handicrafts, is exploited less than the wage-earning child . Certainly, “The stress, fatigue and harmful effects to which he exposed are party compensented for by personal attention and affection which his parents can give him during both work and rest periods The number of hours spent in working varies considerably from 6 to 8 hours per day to even 12 or 14 hours , much more than their young bodies can stands . Often they have no fixed hours at all as in road side café, workshops or domestic work . To this one should add the time spent in travelling to and from the home.In the unorganized urban sector the wages of the child depend entirely on the importance of the work done by him. In any case, the child is paid much less than what an adult earns for the same work. Employer will explain this discrimination by stating that children are inexperienced. The quality and quantity of work produced by them is not the same as adults, they have to be trained and a lot of time and efforts is involved in this. Even in the organized sector, children are hardly ever paid the legal minimum wage. Whatever the occupation, the element of risk is always there as for as a child is concerned. Some occupations like firework and match – making , glass and bangle manufactures and carpet weaving are extremely hazardous and yet children continue to be employed in them. They work in unhygienic condition, with little or no ventilation and bad light.

Their bodies are often in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time and they have to concentrate on minutes detailed work. In carpet waving , they sit in a crouched position for eight hours a day because of which their legs and joints become stiff and their

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growth gets retarted . The intense concentration on the loom all the time lead to eye strain and fatigue. Accidents often occurs at the work sites and there are usually no first did facilities available. The employer does not even bother to take them to a doctor, and the children loom to look after one another. Social security and accident insurance scheme hardly exist. The machinery , tools etc. are designed for adults and not for children. Some of the chemical can be extremely dangerous.

The living conditions of working children are appalling . Families, thought extremely poor , are large in size. In any case the general opinion is that many children mean many more hand to work and earn. The entire „Basti‟ (living area with a cluster of houses or huts) is unhygienic with water logging, dirt insects and flies. The pressure of life is so intense that the adult males spend their evenings drinking and have no time or inclination to look after or supervise the children. The children rooms the streets unattended and uncared for children who leave their village home and come away to the cities to work face acute housing problems. Most of them either sleep on the pavement, in corridor or market places or in a corner in the „Dhaba‟ or the workshop where they work. Their diet is frugal, comprising of dal, chapatti or rice , offer just dry chapatti, sliced onion and salt. They suffer from malnutrition and hunger . They continue to work even when they are ill hence weaken their bodies further. Since he starts working as such an early age, he remains illiterate and unskilled for the rest of his life and “he spends his whole life as the bottom of the social ladder, performing routine, unskilled jobs, when he is not out of job altogether.

CAUSES OF CHILD LABOUR:-

In a country like India where over 40 percent of the population is living in conditions of extremely poverty, child labour is a complex issue.Employers given certain justification for employing children to suppress their guilt feelings.

They say that work keeps children away from starvation . They are prevented from commiting crimes which they would have indulged in if they had no jobs. The bureaucrats hold that the total eradication of child labour is not feasible because the government can not provide substantial alternative employment to them.The social scientist say that the main cause of child labour is poverty. The children either supplement their parents income or are the only wage earners in the family. Poor peoples are forced to send their children to work in factories etc.

Another reason is that child labour is deliberately created by vested interests to get cheap labour. The third reason forwarded for the existence of child labour is that it benefits industries . For example , the carpet industry of U.P. which employse 75,000 children earns about Rs.

150 crore a years in foreign exchange.

CHILD LABOUR LAWS:-

Child labour has existed in some form from time immemorial. But it was only after the advent of factory type evils in the middle of the 19^th century that children began being employed in industries where

they worked for long hours under appalling conditions.

Legislation relating to the regulation of child labour concentrates mainly on four basic issues, which are-

1. minimum age for employment of children .

2. Minimum period of work per day and forbidding work at night.

3. Prohibition of certain types of work for children , and .

4. Medical examination of all working children.

Article 24 of the Indian constitution states –

“No child below the of 14 years shall be employed to work in any factory or mine or enaged in any other hazardous employment”.

Article 39(c) Lays down that the

“The health , strength of workers , men and women and the under age of children are not abused and that citizens are not forced by economic necessity to enter a vacation unsuited to their age or strength.”

The Employment of children Article 1438.

The Act prohibits the employment of children below the age of 15. A child who has completed his fourteen years will be allowed to work in any workshop where any of the processes that in the schedule is carried on/section 3(3).

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3 The schedule:

1- Bidi Making.

2- Carpet weaving, 3- Cement Manufacture

4-Cloth painting and dyeing and weaving

5. Manufacture of matches , explosive and fireworks.

6. Mica cutting and splitting, 7. Tanning and

8. Wood cleaning.

The factories Act, 1998- Prohibited the employment of children below 14 years in a factory. The act prohibits employing children between 14 to 17 years at night (between 10 PM to 06 AM), between 14 and 15 years for not more than 4 ½ hours in one day, only one shift and in one factory.

The implementation of child labours laws in our country is very ineffective . The main reason for this are the lack of adequate enforcement machinery, lack of political will, deliberate attempt of employers to fault the legal provisions and the lack of consciousness within the minds of the parents themselves who will obtain false age and medical certificate to enable their children to work. The inspectors can easily be bribed by the bigger factory owners who keeps false certificates and make false enteries in their registers (if registers exist at all) when the inspectors come, the children are hidden away or put into innocuours jobs.

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS According to the unofficial figures, in India along there are 44 millions children in the labour force. Apart from poverty, the low educational and occupational status of the parents, and inadequacy of the legislative system, as well as, its insufficient inforcement are the other reasons for the persistence of child labour . Though, there are some advantages of child labour, but the negative effects outweigh the positive ones. Children are easy victim to the anti-social activities, like black marketing , smuggling, theft, drug-addiction, prostitution, etc. most of the uvenile workers were males. Most of the female children were working as unpaid family labourers, where they could adjust their working hours according to the requirements. One third of the children did not receive their earnings

themselves, rather the money was went directly to their parents or guardian only one fourth of the children were provide with shelter at their work sites and some children informed they were neglected, abused and punished our trivial mistakes. Many others did not receive proper love and affection from their parents and had run-way from their homes because of the non-adjustment with their families. More than one-third working children were staying in hutment, and a substantial proportion being houseless, were forced to spend the nights either in the night shelters or on the footpaths. More than half of the children (56.7%) did not get time to play due to excessive hours of work, fatigue and responsibility towards household chores. Only one sixth of them could spend their extra time in studies . Educational standards of girls was worse than that of boys. Parents thought education to be purely academic and in appropriate to their work needs. Many parents were willing but unable to educate their children because of their chronic poverty.

Obviously, poverty is the main cause for the early employment of children, but this is not the sole cause.

Many children joined labour force because they did not have anything else to do. On the demand side of child labour, nearly one-third of the employers stated they wanted to help the poverty. Stricken people by providing jobs to their children another important reason for the employment of children was their honesty, low wages and greater efficiency which raised their demand above adults.

Complete abolition of child labour from the country could provide nearly eleven million for unemployed adults. The economic independence an early age make a child pseudo-mature. To differentiate himself from the non-working children and to assimilate in the adult world he develops certain bad habits , such as smoking gambling, drug running, prostitution etc. under the spell of these habits, he spends less money on his food and more on those anti-social activities.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Mohd.Mustafa and Onkar “Child labour in india a Truth” Deep and Deep Publication, Sharma New Delhi P-1 1999.

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2. Prachi Jaiswal “Child labour:A Sociological Study Shipra Publication 115-A Vikas 3. 2000 Marg Shakarpur Delhi P-1

4. P.K Goya“ Street Children and the Child Vista International Publishing 2005 labour.” House Delhi.

5. P.C. Shukla“Street Children and the A Sphall Isha Books D-43 Delhi 200 life P- 34.

6. Burra,Neera “Born to Work:Child labour in Delhi Oxford University Press 1995 India.

7. Kakar Sudhir “Indian Childhood:

Cultural Ideals Delhi Oxford university Press 1979 and Social Policy”.

8. Singh Bhagwan Prasad “Children at Work:Problems and B.R.Publishing Delhi House And Mohanty Shukla(eds) Policy options.” 1993

9. Ram Ahuja “Social Problems in India.”

Rawat Publications Jaipur, 1997 New Delhi P-234

10. johUnzukFk eqdthZ “lkekftd leL;k,” foosd izdk”ku tokgj uxj]fnYyh&7 Hkjr vxzoky P-325 2003

JOURNAL

Burra,Neera 1986“Glass factories pf Firozabad:

Plight of Workers‟ Economic and Polihcal Weekly , 22 nov.21”2033-2036.

Burra,Neera,1986“Health Hazzards”-Seminar October-3 50: 24-28

REPORTS

Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986‟

1987. Indian Labour Journal. August 28(8): 1142- 1152.

Report of the Committee on Child labour. 1979 Ministry of Labour. Government of India. Indian Labour Year Book 1990 Labour Bureau,ministry of Labour: Government of India.