Child labour is a sad reality. Be it the Shivkashi cracker industry or be it Dharavi, children working under horrific conditions is the sad truth.
You,too, must have been moved by the sight of children squirrelling their way in the maze of the mad traffic at every major cross road to earn just a rupee or two. Most often, they are garishly painted with hazardous colours to represent the reigning deity of the day. Imagine what the blazing hot summer must be doing to their tender skin under that garish coat.
Child labour is nothing new. Blake has superb poems on chimney sweepers in both his books, of innocence, of experience. In our early teens, all of us have wept over Oliver Twist's tragic fate. In brief, Fagins may come and Fagins may go, child labour refuses to wither away, rather like the state!
In fact, it is believed that the poor think that the more hands in a family, better means they are of more money, and hence give birth to many more mouths who lead a miserable life on footpaths, as labour bonded for a lifetime for a few rupees literally, and in constant denial of each and every human right of theirs.
Despite the ILO declaring June 12 as the international anti child labour day, and many a Magsaysay awards later, the issue remains where it was as it is a cheap labour market, available in indecent abundance.
Of all the child lives lost to cruel conditions, nothing can be as wicked as child trafficking which would destroy a young life in to a hard core criminality against mankind itself!
How and when the end of this cruel practice of child labour is anybody's ever unanswered guess. Hope very soon arrives that day when all the children of the whole world would learn, behind the butterflies run and have unlimited fun!
Pratima@Wicked is child labour/how from innocent lives we it tear?
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