The Challenge of Child Labour in India in Rural Areas: With a Special Focus on Migration, Agriculture, and Mining and Brick Kilns

Abstract

This is clearly observable in media reporting, legislative processes, national and international posturings on the subject of child labour. The Indian scene has been rendered more complex due to lack of factual knowledge (even among the researchers) on regional, gender and rural dimensions of its incidence. This lacuna has nothing to do with absence of statistical data or hard facts available in public domain. The available statistics are hardly processed, analysed and deceminated. The problem is neither ignorance nor lack of data. But rather shallow and partial understanding of the issues involved. Among many articulate and determined interest groups facts are not allowed to come in the way of their opinions and unexamined beliefs This paper is an attempt to provide a tentative framework for an objective, factual and systematic look at important dimensions of the child labour problem in rural India. The paper is divided into various sections. This Section are with history of the child labour phenomena in industrialised market economies. Clarifies the changing meaning and concepts of child labour and ILO’s views on the subject. Devoted to the growth of child population and school education. Section IV brings out gender dimensions of child labour and Nowhere Children in Rural India. Section V deals with sectoral distribution of child labour and with age composition of child labor With fragmented and urban oriented policy response to the child labour problem. Last Section brings out limitations of the existing policy responses to the challenge of child labour in rural limitations of the existing policy responses to the challenge of child labor in rural India and elsewhere and the need for their orchestration.