The World Day Against Child labour was observed by various agencies on June 12. Child labour is a phenomenon of engaging children below 18 years of age in various works instead of providing them access to education. let alone their numbers in India or in the State, even presence of a single child labourer is as a symptom of a dehumanising value and a collective human failure.
It is well known that both demand and supply perpetuate the child labour system. Demand arises due to cheap wage, exploitation opportunity and nature of certain child compatible activities. The supply side rationale includes poverty-pressure, migration of parents, cultural practices and repulsion of the education system. Punitive legislation aims at demand reduction while positive law like the RTE Act or UN SGD-goals and welfare measures aim at supply reduction. But why the system is not breakingIJ
So far, we have not intervened in one domain. It is the transformation in parents’ attitude or “worth” towards their children. There is a need for paradigm shift from material programmes to behavioural intervention. It is important to understand the structure of the consciousness of the child-labourers’ parents who are poor or from the social weaker section groups. If the parents are urban, the foundation of their consciousness is a combination of traditional and progressive values which influence the way they treat their children. They prefer less number of children and feel it their duty to give better education to their children for a better future. The urban parents, including the urban slum dwellers, value small family, institutional delivery, early child care, child education and late marriage of their kids and so on.
On the contrary, the rural parents, especially those belonging to the SC and ST groups, have a consciousness structure that is a predominantly cultural stereotype. Even if some are educated parents, they lose their identity due to the presence of larger village “mass consciousness”. What is the structure of the village mass consciousnessIJ The script consists of chapters such as girls are a liability to a family, children are born or die as per their luck, children should be beaten up to become good children, children have to work early to learn work skills, children in general and girl child in particular should marry early, local health practices are better than western health science, children are a part of family work system and so on. All these components show a script of the parents and the villagers where the child worth is part of the usual low village human worth. The social ranking is the elderly males occupy the top, followed by adult married men, next mothers, next unmarried boys, next unmarried girls, next male child and finally the female child at the bottom. In a mixed caste village, the Dalit female children remain at the bottom of the hierarchy. Had the religious scriptures put child neglect as a “sin”, child labour would not have been a phenomenon, though it is not the case. If the children remain low at the social pyramid, how can they be treated with worth by parentsIJ How can the child labour system be stoppedIJ
It is equally worth studying the parents’ self-worth. In a mixed village, the high caste father is at the top of the social pyramid and the mother is placed lower, after grandparents.
In a joint family, the father of a child feels his low self-worth as long as his parents are alive. He is only liberated after the death of his old parents. But till that time, he has given birth to his children and those children would have passed the scripted dehumanising village- child- path of low educational aspiration and early marriage. The grandparents will keep promising the parents of the child that the labour and land of the family is sufficient for survival of the children if they fail to study.
When we look at the parents in a mixed caste-group village setting, we find that the parents of the Dalit children have low self-worth. The parents of the poor families have low-self worth too. That is why they can travel on the roof of a village bus, even though they pay the bus fare. They can travel in general compartments of trains, sitting on the crowded floor like chicken in poultry farms. The women never demand for a reserved seat in the bus because they are treated low in the families. The village thus gets divided into families with “high self worth” and “low self worth”. A person, experiencing low self worth for him or herself, can never give worth to his “children”.
Therefore, he does not feel the pain when he sells his so called “surplus” child to another family or see the child’s toes get cut due to work or the child sleeps under a polythene in a migrant work place.
So what is important in a child labour mitigation intervention, is building the “worth” of the parents and their children. As parents live in the village consciousness, there is a need for continuous work with a group of adjacent villages to alter the village consciousness and child worth-rankingIJ Behavioral training and action programmes can help in this regard, not schemes.