Child Labor in India

Children in India are being forced to work many hours a day for very little pay. More than 20 % of India’s economy are child workers under the age of 14. This is a problem they operate on deadly machines and they can be harmed. They also are exposed to bad working environments and can be injured or killed. If the refuse to work they are threatened or beaten. This a problem and this needs to stop because children have the right to a child hood. (Dougall,

In a handful of third world countries living with poverty, the only way for a child to afford his dinner, a loaf of bread, is to stitch balls for hours a day. Child labor, children under the age of 1 working for pay, is a common thing for these kids I n third world countries. Working in factories and making money is everything to these kids because it benefits their families and their countries. Consumers should purchase products made by the hands of children.

There's a long history about child labor throughout out the years from the beginning of time until now. “Child labor started in mid-1800s in developed countries like Great Britain and U.S. Child labor was a part of life. Great Britain in the lates 1800s, parliaments investigated abuses against children working in factories. While U.S. started in early 2900s to determine the extent of child labor in industry” (Zoltan, Melanie). In the twenty-first century, people started to talk on child labor centered on these less-developed regions, specifically on countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, China, and Malaysia, because child labor is still going on know there (Zoltan, Melanie). The industrial revolution made a really big part of child labor, because

India alone is receiving $40 million this year to reach 80,000 working children (CQ Researcher 2010). While ILO enacted the 1999 Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention which restricts all full-time work and any work by children under 12, children in developing countries aren’t attending school on a daily basis. They are forced to work hazardous jobs at young ages and endure debilitating abuse.

This shows that 13% of children are not receiving an education and that a lot of countries still using child labor. Also, children faces health and safety risk because they are working in dirty environments. Also, children lift heavy equipments that they have to use in order to work and children aren’t strong enough to be carrying heavy equipments.

Sparks fly off heavy machinery and sweat and grim coat the foreheads of weary children. Child labor is a serious recurring problem in countries such as South Asia. Some find the use of youths in the work field a necessity in order to preserve a roof over their heads, however, these actions can cause continual conflicts in the lives of young individuals. Child labor in South Asia has a massive negative impact on the youths living there because it places many young lives in dangerous working atmospheres, rips time away from earning a proper education, and their tiring work efforts are often rewarded with little to no pay.

According to the International Labour Organization, over 168 million children are child labourers even till now. Children as young as five work ten to twelve hours in factories, but only earning a few dollars, or even cents a day. If they ever try to escape, they are mutilated, raped or even murdered as a punishment. Not only are they treated like slaves, but more than half of the children work in dangerous places, such as gunpowder

The social studies text, child labor around the world, by Nelda Marquez discusses child labor around the world. The social studies text describes how children are forced to work instead of going to school.

Child labor can cause children to have mental, emotional, and spiritual development for the children. In 2012, 44.6 million children of Asia are working at factories at the age of 5-17. At the same year, 11.6 percent of the children from China were in child labor at ages 10-14. Child labor affects the child’s education, which will cause them to be uneducated which will also affect their future. Some of the children in child labor might even die because they do not get enough sleep and does not get full each meal because of dangerous working conditions. Some children wake up early to work but does not stop working until very late at night. Children do not get the pay they deserve even when they are very poor and needs these money for their family. Many children are in child labor because their families are poor and can not afford for them to go to school, which will affect their education and also their future. Most of the children who are in child labor live on the countryside, which is poor. Families in the countryside do not have enough money to pay for health care or might not have enough money to raise a child. Many families in this situation would choose to sell their children to factories or to work as slaves. After the child is sold, the family members will not know how much pain the child is in. If the child did not listen to the owner, the child would get punished, either whipped or be beaten hardly with a shovel. Children who were in child labor lived in a small,

Child Labor by definition is employment in which harms children, deprives of their childhood and youth, interferes in their ability to gain a proper education, harmful, morally dangerous and has mental and physical ramifications. Many American’s called child labor “child slavery”, not only did it deprive children of an education but it also robbed them of a proper education and condemned them to illiteracy in their future.

Child labor is now a global concern and has attracted attention of people in various sectors of the global economy. As a matter of fact International labor organization (ILO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international communities considers child labor completely abusive and ruthless. It is also considered to be derived from unequal society and therefore could be said that poverty and unequal distribution of wealth within the society makes children to go to work and in many cases to look after their family. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that there are about 250 million economically active children worldwide. 61% of these workers are in Asia, which equals to approximately 153 million children. In Sub-Saharan area 1 in 4 children aged between the ages of 5 -17 work, compared to 1 in 8 in Asia. Around half of the economically children are working fulltime, and about 30 to 46 million are in very abusive and ruthless conditions or worse forms of child labor.

It has been said that children are the greatest gift to humanity and that childhood is an important stage of human development as it holds the potential to the future of any society. Many children around the world are denied the right of having a childhood. When children preform work tasks at a young age, children reduce their present welfare or future income earning capabilities (Singh, 2013). In 2014, the International Labour Organization reported that “Globally there are 168 million child laborers, over half of which, 85 million, are in hazardous work conditions” (ILO). Child labor is not a new phenomenon by any means; it has been going on for years and has become a social issue. This paper aims to portray the nature of child labor in India. It looks at the definition of child labor, the prevalence, and factors that lead children to work.

If or when a parent thinks about losing their child, they would never think about of selling them into slavery. Families in India need to resort to this to get out of their debt. Child Labor in India affects millions of adolescents as well as their families. If India made laws restricting how long a child could work before they need to take a break. By making harsher laws and punishments that would hurt the slaveholder more. As well as making laws that would make the government help families with lower incomes get money. There would be fewer slaves in the country of India.

Human rights of children are being violated in India because of child labor. Child labor is the illegal use of children in a business or organization. Child labor is inhumane and is a human rights violation to children because it takes away their childhood and forces them to do work that is harmful to their bodies and to their minds. In India, there are approximately 1.3 million people and other problems in the country are making it hard for the government to find time to make a solution to illegal child labor. The child labor in India is the result of debt bondage from families, kidnappings, lack of education, and no government intervention.

On December 11, 1992, India endorsed the Convention on the Rights of the Child but did not agree to one clause that declared children, fourteen years of age and younger, to be protected by the law to not engage in hazardous working conditions. The convention was open for ratification in 1898 and mapped out basic necessary rights for children under the age of eighteen. These are a few of the rights India ratified: the right to education, the right to information, the right to nutrition, the right to health and care, the right to protection from abuse, the right to protection from exploitation, the right to development, and the right to survival. India has also created a law in 2006 that banned the use of child labor for domestic purposes and in the hospitality industry (Clifford, 2011).