Bageshree S/The Hindu

• Karnataka wanted to eliminate child labour by 2007. It extended the deadline by five years. Is it moving in the right direction? 
• NGOs put the number of child workers at over 10 lakh
• Officials say they lack expertise in rehabilitation

Bangalore, May 23: Fire and Emergency Service personnel, who went to douse a fire that had broken out at a bar and restaurant on Rest House Road two weeks ago, came upon someone they did not expect in the smoke-engulfed first floor of the building: 13-year-old Darshan.

An employee of the restaurant, he was asleep after a hard day's work when smoke began to fill the air-conditioned hall. The boy had woken up choking and terrified and locked himself in a toilet.

Darshan has mysteriously "gone missing" since then. Cubbon Park police, in fact, now say that they have no knowledge of such a boy being rescued.

Is this a reminder of the fact at the end of endless plans and talk on eradication of child labour, the inhuman practice has at best become just a little less visible?

The last time the issue of child labour was debated was when the Union Government included work in homes and hospitality industry as hazardous for children in October 2006. These were additions to the 70 occupations that were already categorised as hazardous.

Raids

This was followed by a series of raids to rescue employed children and put them in homes run under the National Child Labour Project and the State Child Labour Project.

But what exactly has been the outcome of this is a debatable question. About 450 children have been rescued since then through raids, according to one estimate. The Labour Department could not offer consolidated statistics immediately saying the raids were spread across the State.

A Labour Department official argues that child labour cannot be handled through rescue operations, unless they supplement larger socio-economic measures such as implementation of Right to Education. But raids have created awareness and helped reduce its prevalence, he adds.

P.N. Basavaraju of the NGO Bosco, who regularly keeps a check on entry points of migrant child labourers such as bus stops and railway stations, counters this. "Even as children are being rescued at one end, child labourers are pumped into the market from another. Touts who supply children to hotels work hand-in-glove with the police," he says.

In fact, there are no specific figures on child labour in the State. In the absence of a focussed data, decennial census and Education Department's statistics on out-of-school children are treated as indicators of the extent of child labour. As on March 31, 2003, out-of-school children in Karnataka stood at 10.54 lakh. It is said to have come to 1.61 lakh in March 2006.

But this data is highly questionable, say activists. Child Rights Trust did a re-survey in one educational cluster (Papinayakanahalli in Bellary) and found 182 out-of-school children as against the official figure of five. NGOs put the total number of child workers at "no less than 10 lakh."

Equally important is the micro level picture: what happens to the children who are "rescued"? Many NGOs fear that the lack of direction in rehabilitation programmes may have pushed many back into the labour market. "Teachers in rehabilitation centres are not even specially trained," says Vasudev Sharma of Child Rights Trust (CRT), who is also a member of Child Welfare Committee (CWC) constituted under the Juvenile Justice Act to hear cases of abuse. "There is no co-ordination between government departments. It cannot work unless education, health, social welfare and other departments work together."

Sheela Devaraj of Association for Promotion of Social Action also stresses the need for better coordination, even as she says that putting in place structures such as CWC is an achievement. Labour Department officials admit that they lack of expertise in rehabilitation. "We can punish the erring employer and put the child in a rehabilitation centre. But follow-up should be done by other departments," says an official.

Karnataka's grand action plan drafted in 2001 to eliminate child labour by 2007 has now been extended by five years. A major area of "rethinking" now will be on building linkages between departments, he adds.

Interestingly this very issue was significantly discussed in the first draft of the Action Plan way back in 2001: "In order to implement the Action Plan successfully, the involvement of all the Departments of Government is essential. This point has been stressed and the responsibility for each department is fixed in the Action Plan. The child labour problem has to be tackled through an integrated approach and convergence of services."

Let us hope it will not be another déjà vu in 2012.