CHILDREN’S RIGHTS
CHILD LABOUR AND THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION
Is India’s Child Labour (Prohibition & Regulation) Law enough to protect the rights of children to education?
Within India, there is
Prem Das Rai MP is a member of the India Parliament of the 16th Lok Sabha from Sikkim and represents CPA India on the CPA Executive Committee as a regional representative. He was also a Member of the 15th Lok Sabha, is currently the Secretary-General of North-East MPs Forum and is a member of the Committees on Finance, Subordinate Legislation and Consultative Committee on Tribal Affairs. He has also served as the Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Commission of Sikkim.
. We are putting effort into evolving a mechanism that will create the millions of jobs that will help us put our youth into meaningful jobs in all sectors of our growing economy.
considerable debate about the economic benefits that will come by way of demographic dividend. In fact, we have been having this discourse for over a decade. Our country has one of the youngest populations in the world, with almost half the population under the age of 291
Going by some of the recent initiatives and statements embedded in the 2015 budget speech of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, we intend to become the fastest growing economy in the world. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is upbeat that with policies like ‘make in India’ we will achieve that goal.
However, the underbelly of this demographic is the huge number of young children who go to work every day. There can be no denying that about 1.67% of children between the ages of 5 to 14 years old are working2
.
Overall, ten states represent 80% of the child labour burden in India3
. They are mostly in the more populous states of India like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, whilst North Eastern States do not seem to have this phenomenon. If at all, it
108 | The Parliamentarian | 2015: Issue Two
is limited in numbers. Child labour is therefore a problematic issue especially in view of our policies being geared towards getting children out of work and putting them into schools through a rights-based legislation. In a move towards that end, the Union Cabinet approved amendments to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill 2012 (“Child Labour Bill”) on 13 May 2015. The proposal seeks to ban the employment of children below 14 years of age in all occupations and processes, with certain limited exceptions. The proposal further prohibits the employment of adolescents (14 to 18 years) in hazardous occupations and processes. The original Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 (“Child Labour Act”) banned the employment of children below the age of 14 in only 18 hazardous industries and 65 processes and covered less than 20% of the working children between the age group of 5-19 years4
.
The objective of the proposed amendments is to ensure that the right to education for children between the ages of 6 to 14 years is not compromised in line with the spirit of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 (“RTE Act”). The Child Labour Act, once
amended, will be titled as the ‘Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986’ to reflect the expanded scope. The proposed amendments need to be passed by both the Houses of the Parliament and receive the assent of the President of India before it becomes law. This article provides the legislative background and an assessment of key provisions of the proposed amendments. It also presents an argument for ensuring that the national policies on child labour and education are consistent and based on the child rights framework.
Legislation process In 1979, the Government of India appointed the Gurupadaswamy Committee that studied the issue of child labour and observed that as long as poverty continued, it would be difficult to totally eliminate child labour. Furthermore, the Committee observed that “any attempt to abolish child labour through legal recourse would not be a practical proposition.” In light of these observations, the Committee recommended a ban on child labour in hazardous areas and a multiple policy to deal with the problems of working children. Based on the
recommendations, the Child
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