It's said that “children are flowers of heaven”. Yes, indeed they are
if they are born to prosperous families and have access to the comforts
of life. The faces of children who we see selling evening editions of
local newspapers and helping the 'Ustad Ji' at a workshop, or roaming
around the streets as hawkers in the scorching heat are also flowers of
heaven but may be that heaven is not ours. In 2011, despite the wailing
and whining over the violation of child rights by various forums,
today's working children do not know what their rights are, or that they
also possess the faculties which could be polished through education to
turn them into a better human and a useful citizen. The poverty that
they and their generations have been borne in is not letting them use
their intellect, think, realize or recognize their status in the society
nor do they know what rights they have.
Child labor is when a child is working during early
age, overworks or gives over time to labor, works due to
psychologically, socially, and materialistic pressure. United Nations
International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) defines “Child Lab our”
as some type of work performed by children below age 18.
Considering these definitions, if we take a look around our suburbs,
we see a slum or two in every sector from posh to average, where
humanity sobs, day and night, wondering why the economic disparity
existed in the first place?
All and sundry countries of the world are directly or indirectly
affected by this serious global issue, but it is very common in Latin
America, Africa and Asia. In several Asian countries, 1/10th of the
total manpower consists of child labor. In India alone the number of
working children between the ages of 10-14 has crossed above 44 million,
in Pakistan this number is from 8 to 10 million, in Bangladesh 8-12
million, in Brazil 7 million, whereas their number is 12 million in
Nigeria.
During the last year, the Federal Bureau of Statistics released the
results of its survey funded by ILO's IPECL (International Program on
the Elimination of Child Labor). The findings were that 3.8 million
children of age group 5-14 years are working in Pakistan out of total 40
million children in this age group; fifty percent of these economically
active children are in age group of 5 to 9 years. Even out of these 3.8
million economically active children, 2.7 million were claimed to be
working in the agriculture sector. Two million and four hundred thousand
(73%) of them were found to be boys.
Speaking strictly of the Capital Territory, travelling to the
International Airport situated in the middle of the twin cities, one can
observe the brick kilns alongside the highway. There is a cumbersome
mix of self employed, bonded labor and paid labor working for the kiln
owners, generation after generations. In this area, all three types of bonded labor exist.
The first is when a child inherits a debt carried by his or her parents.
The other is when a child is used as collateral for a loan. e.g. a
parent facing an unusually large or urgent expense would use this method
to obtain necessary money.
The third is when a child worker enters into a bondage to their
employer by requesting an advance on future wages they expect to earn.
Children of age five on, are at work with their parents, both or
either of them, helping in preparing material for making bricks, placing
them and taking care of them till they are fit for being taken to the
furnaces, without any wages. They start to earn when they can carry out
the brick making independently and are aged 10 or above. At the age 10
they earn 100 rupees a day so their parents prefer sending them to work
instead of sending them to school. Even if free schooling
is offered free education, parents don't send their children to schools
owing to the sacrifice of the child's daily wage.
In some areas where these welfare organizations have been able to
mobilize parents to send their child to school for few hours, some 10
out of 100 families finally decide to take their children back to work.
Another result of this mobilization is that 5 out of 20 parents prefer
sending their male children to school while hold their female children
back for work. Especially garbage collectors have a tendency that they
like their girls to work while their boys study in anticipation of a
better future. Parents also prefer girls above age 10 to go to schools
due to the street crimes against young girls.
A need identification survey for an education project in the area, by
a non government welfare organization, last year showed that some 1000
working children were willing to go to schools if education was free,
but owing to the prohibition to do so from their kiln owners their
parents either did not enroll them or took them back after enrollment.
This area of brick kilns alongside the road is not very far from the
capital city, yet number of government schools compared to the
population of the area is not worth mentioning. The private sector
institutions are not really worried about the need of education for
working children of the area, nor are resources of the welfare
organizations enough to meet their needs.
Another type of child labor is observed in weekly markets set up by
CDA, in G-9 and Aab Para as well as I-9. These children selling grocery
bags and small household items including termite and insect control
remedies and young girls' accessories, have grown so many in number that
mere keeping them away from these markets would create enough space for
another market to be set within these markets.
You will children with healthy faces and neat clothing, selling pens,
inflatable toys, coloring books, sweets, candies and similar other
things, for prices thrice as much as their actual market price at
traffic signals. Evening editions of local newspapers have also been
observed to be sold by mostly disabled children or youth, to the extent
that people on the roads around 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM can easily recognize
some familiar faces, growing from children into adults, doing the same
jobs. Schools girls aged 12-15 have tactfully structured statements that
they have been repeating for years now, at different places, to sell
whatever item they carry, complemented by artistically crafted face
expressions and stream of tears flowing down their eyes. Observers often
wonder about categorizing this activity as forced labour or begging.
Child labor is an urgent issue for the Millennium Development Agenda.
Without reaching millions of children in Pakistan, currently working in
hazardous and exploitative conditions, the Mellinium Development Goals
of attaining Universal Primary Education (MDG-2) and Gender Parity in
Primary and Secondary Education (a key indicator for MDG-3) cannot be
reached. According to Dan Rohrmann, Unicef Pakistan's representative.
“Safe, accessible and high-quality education is the best way to
encourage families to send their children to school and to prevent
children from engaging in the worst forms of labor.”
Development and welfare organizations working in Pakistan have
stressed the need of compiling new statistical data on child labor and
have been urging government to invest resources in it as there has not
been a National Child Labor Survey since 1996. The Child Labor Survey
1996 found that 3.3 million of the 40 million children between the ages
of 5 and 14 in Pakistan were “economically active on a full-time basis”,
while, coalition against child labor Pakistan (CACLP) report claims
that there were 21 million children employed as laborers across the
country, raising a big question mark.
International Labor Organization (ILO) expects a countrywide survey
by the Pakistan Government this year, claiming through its Country
Office Pakistan that the new child labour survey will provide updated
statistical information on hazardous forms of child labour, in Pakistan,
for which they and their partners are supporting the government to
implement equitable national programmes to increase school enrolment and
other social protections.
A recent report on 'State of Pakistan's Children 2010' released by
Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) revealed
that “the trend of child labour is decreasing globally but unfortunately
in Pakistan there has been an increasing trend.”
The present government in Pakistan has made elementary education
compulsory. Along with this, the government has distributed free books
in primary schools so that parents, who cannot afford their children's
school expenses, send their children to schools but this is hard to
figure out that how the free text book distribution of Rs. 10 million or
more to private educational institutions alone, charging a monthly
tuition fee below Rs. 300, will contribute to increasing enrollments in
the schools by giving the children books only and what is the guarantee
that the private schools will take in those children as students who
cannot pay any fee at all, rather their families are sacrificing the
monetary benefit they could derive from them by putting them to work?
Child labor is an outcome of a multitude of socio-economic factors
and has its roots in poverty, lack of opportunities, high rate of
population growth, unemployment, uneven distribution of wealth and
resources, outdated social customs and norms and numerous other factors.
According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) the daily
income of 65.5% people of Pakistan is below 2 U.S. dollars a day.
According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Report, 47 million people
in Pakistan are leading lives below the line of poverty, whereas the
Social Policy Development Centre (SDPC) Karachi has stated in one of its
reports that the ratio of poverty in Pakistan was 33% during 1999 that
increased in 2001 and reached 38%. The ratio of poverty in the current
year is around 30%.
Realistically speaking, if 30% of our country's total population is
living below the poverty-line wherein the people are deprived of basic
necessities of life including clothing, shelter, food, education and
medication, the children of these people will be forced to become
laborers or workers in order to help their families fight the battle of
survival. Another reason of child labor in Pakistan is absence of
security of social life in the form of aid plan or allowance for
children. Class-based education system has also disabled the parents
that being unable to bear educational expenses of their children they
have been left with no choice but to put them to learn skills to earn
themselves at least a subsistent living in future to survive.
Making education compulsory, legislation against child labor and
enactment of the labor laws will be of little account if poverty
continuous to curtail the economic opportunities for the
underprivileged. The situation is unlikely to change in the absence of
National Development Goals which are persistent, uniform and call for a
broad education system. Awareness level of the masses
needs to be raised and exploitative attitude of the society towards the
lower segments also needs to be addressed to tackle this multifaceted
issue of child labor.