The spark ‘must’ return
Updated on
Monday, June 12, 2006, 00:00
IST
Ritam Banati
Today, sadly is the International Day against Child Labour or Anti-Child Labour Day. Sadly because there is still the need to observe it. There is still a need to abolish child labour. There is still the task to revive innocence in the dead eyes of a working child.
The problem with all of us here, whenever we try to address this problem, is that we either get lost in statistics or we start tabulating the various acts formulated by different governments of the world. Due to this malady in our thinking pattern we tend to neglect the more basic but vital issues.
The fact is that compiling objective information, assessing the technical aspects of the problem, formulating policies and concentrating on the figurative aspects of the problem neither solves the issue nor does it help substantially in doing the same. The issue here is not even sensitisation alone as there are quite a few people in this world who want to make a difference and are doing so either through NGOs or alone. And there is also no dearth of jobs for NGOs and individuals working in this direction.
The question then is why then is child labour so rampant in the world. Not only are the developing countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc in the grips of it but even the developed nations of Europe and America are not spared of the malaise. This is a clear indication of the fact that development has often bypassed children.
Perhaps the issue needs to be addressed slightly differently. Perhaps we get oblivious to emotions in our search for facts and figures. This is not to say that facts and figures are not important, they are significant in so far as they tell us the magnitude of the problem even though the statistics may not always be cent percent correct. They help in focusing our attention on the problem because unfortunately or fortunately whichever way you want to put it we would have otherwise ignored the gravity of the situation at hand.
The point here is not how many children are working in hazardous or non-hazardous occupations. The issue here really is that of the Fundamental Right of “each and every” child to childhood. Like it was stated in one of the workshops in India in 1988, “When you look into a child’s eyes you expect to see hope, trust and innocence, but when you see these signs of childhood are replaced by betrayal, hunger, fear and suspicion, we need to take serious stock of ourselves and the society we have created.” And today is 2007. What are our achievements? The fact that millions of children are still in the tentacles of labour instead of being in school.
The point also is that many among us just think, debate and write about the problem with the hope that someone among us will get sensitized enough to take the plunge against child labour forgetting that it needs to start form one’s own self. If each one of us in this world shoulders the responsibility of rehabilitating even one child, there would be no need to observe this day next year.
It would also be an exaggeration if we pin-point in the direction of how much we have achieved so far to mitigate this. It would be very practical if we sit back and think for a change what all needs to be achieved and how. How? Not through global marches not by the observation of the day, not by thinking or writing for that matter but then how? Think a little more. The answer is just waiting to be discovered.