In India, poor children start working at a very young age. Some of the children work to help their families and at the same time, some families want their children to help them to run the family business. The government of India has always followed a proactive policy to fight with the problem of child labour.
The successive governments at centre have always stood for constitutional, statutory and developmental measures to eliminate the cause of child labor. The constitution of India has deliberately integrated appropriate provisions to provide compulsory universal elementary education and protection from child labor as well for children.
However, the Chief Justice of India (CJI), K G Balakrishnan, lamented that all the anti-child labor laws were not being implemented across the country. He, while delivering speech on Friday at a seminar in the country on justice delivery standards for children, said that there were several proper legislations in place just to protect children and to work for children’s welfare.He further said that the implementations of these laws are still lagging behind in the country and it needs strong will power to implement such laws at ground level first. The seminar was organized by the Legal Assistance Forum. He also told that very few states such as Manipur and Orissa were implementing the Juvenile Justice Act seriously. He also said at the seminar that child labor was always a major problem in the country.
According to the data, India has a child population of over 445 million and 126 million of them are less than five years old. Is India serious about the welfare of its future, the children?
The progress report for children, released by UNICEF in December 2007, says that an estimated 2.1 million children in India died before their fifth birthday in just one year. The shocking part of the story is that of these deaths, more than one million deaths happened in case of less than 29-day-old infants. They died but the causes were preventable and curable. The data says that 25 per cent of all neo-natal deaths across the world occurred in India.
Nearly 50 per cent of low weight babies (8.3 million infants were low weight babies with less than 2,500 grams) died before their fifth birthday. That means at least 1/3rd of less-than-five-year-old underweight children of the world are in India.
The government of India will have to work hard in cooperation with state governments to restrict the child labor in the country and to concentrate hard to give better healthcare to the newborn babies as well. Sometimes, such goals look difficult to attain due to cultural and economic factors but this is the need of the time for us to stand and take oath to take care of the children, who are the future of our nation.
