Child labor in India: Assessing the efficiency of legal tools and governmental policy

Résumé du document

Child labor is a widely condemned practice which can have staggering effects on the health and wellbeing of children, as it can often involve toiling in mines or quarries, being exposed to harmful chemical substances, or sitting and standing for long hours in dreadful conditions. In response to this plight, which is still shared by millions of children in developing countries today, a principle of protection of children's rights has emerged under the aegis of the human rights movement. This principle finds a concrete manifestation in many international conventions and legal texts.

However, in most emerging or third-world countries, economic necessity and the process of economic development demand a very large workforce, prompting companies to resort to abundant and cheap child labor. Under pressure from international organizations and bodies of law, the States fostering this phenomenon have been compelled to adopt laws and policies aimed at fighting child labor. India has notably enshrined the prohibition of child labor in its first independent Constitution, and has since described in more detail the extent of this prohibition (which is not comprehensive), in its 1986 Child Labor Act.

Extraits

[...] Among the international instruments signed by India, the main one is thus most definitely the ILO's International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), which was created in 1991. India was the first country to sign the IPEC's Memorandum of Understanding in 1992. The IPEC assists member-States in combating child labor. In 1989, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the first binding international convention on the human rights of children under the age of 18. [...]

[...] Moreover, the Act has been poorly enforced. Indeed, in spite of the existence of the law and of the recommendations and advice of the Indian Supreme Court, the Act is still not enforced in many States. For implementation, each State must formulate a set of rules and regulations, and most States still had not done that, years after the law was passed. The Act allows local governments to appoint inspectors in charge of ensuring compliance with its provisions, but instead, most local governments have chosen to allocate this task to the preexisting labor inspectors. [...]

[...] Most of the sources providing data on child labor in India are thus flawed, due to issues of definition of the concept of “child labor”. Because of article 24 of the Constitution, which regulates child labor by considering only children below the age of 14, many of these studies share this age classification, and fail to include workers aged 15 to 19, who arguably are also children. If we consider these children as well, data shows that 11% of the Indian workforce is children. [...]

[...] See : Child Labor : Issues, Causes and Interventions, Faraaz Siddiqi, Harry Anthony Patrinos, Human Capital Development and Operations Policy (HCO Working Papers), pages 8-10. See : Child Labor : Issues, Causes and Interventions, Faraaz Siddiqi, Harry Anthony Patrinos, Human Capital Development and Operations Policy (HCO Working Papers), pages 8-10. See : The Economics of Child Labor Kaushik Basu, Pham Hoang Van, the American Economic Review, June 1988, Volume 88, No page 414. [...]

[...] The current child labor situation in India is unlikely to change immediately due to collusion of corporations, families and upper castes which all have a stake in child labor and find economic advantages to it. In this context, a new legislative intervention to abolish child labor entirely would be useless, and emphasis should instead be placed upon more thorough enforcement of the existing national legal framework. Sources Articles The Economics of Child Labor, Kaushik Basu, Pham Hoang Van, the American Economic Review, June 1988, Volume 88, No The Intriguing Relation between Adult Minimum Wage and Child Labour, Kaushik Basu, The Economic Journal, Vol No Conference Papers, March 2000, available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2565722. [...]