By: R. Venkat Reddy, MV Foundation, India

The UN’s children agency UNICEF recently has warned the world that the COVID-19 pandemic is becoming a child rights crisis. The imapct of COVID-19 and subsequent lockdown on the plight of children reconfirms this statement. India has the largest child population in the world, with 47.20 crore children, many of whom are going through the pandemic without roofs on their heads. Most Indian houses (69%) have only one room or two-rooms according to Census data.  Houses are not necessarily the safest spaces for everyone uniformly, especially for children living in abusive households. This means that there is not enough space for individuals to practice social distancing within their homes. This also means that children have little to no privacy and have to share their spaces with other members.

As you would agree, the worst effected are children of daily wage earners and casual workers who have no work, livelihood and earnings.  Their families are vulnerable, having no reserves of food, with children going hungry and having barely one meal a day. In India, with a share of almost 90 per cent of people working in the informal economy, about 40 crore workers in the informal economy are at the risk of falling deeper into poverty during the crisis.

We are witness to heartwrenching stories of migrant workers with their infants and young children who were left without any option but to walk hundreds of kilometres from their workplaces back to their communities. A recent estimate by India’s Labour and Employment Ministry, referring to migration between states in the country, pegs the size of the migrant workforce in 2016 at over 10 crore. Obviously, out of these ten-crore population roughly 20 to 25% constitute children.

We have seen how employers of children and the middlemen abandoned children in work places and left them to their fate without food, shelter and any form of protection soon after the imposition of lock down. According to National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) in 2016 everyday 150 children go missing in India – kidnapped or abducted. Unofficial and unreported cases could be in millions.

During the lockdown we hear about episodes of boys and girls being forced to join the workforce in agriculrure on cotton, chilli, paddy, vegtable and other farms. There is no doubt that middlemen would exploit the vulnerabilities of the poor families and start their operations of trafficking children. There were 3.3 crore working children between the ages of 5 – 18 years (census 2011) of whom 62 per cent were employed in agriculture. The crisis will add more to these numbers. According to Harleen Walia, Deputy Director of Childline India, the number of calls on the helpline since the lockdown has increased by 50%. Around 8% of other calls out of a total of 3.07 lakh calls received were regarding child labour.

There is growing evidence that girls are at a greater risk, being subjects to violence, physical abuse, sexual harassment, burden of household work and child marriages/early marriages. National Family Health Survey (NFHS) says that the prevalence of child marriages is 21% in 2015-16 (NFHS-4). This figure is likely to increase by huge numbers. According to UNICEF, the estimated number of children exposed to domestic violence is between 27.1 to 69 million.

In such a background there is a danger of children not coming back to schools whenever schools reopen in the post-lock down period. Even such children who are attending low cost private schools may drop out. Girls face even greater risk of becoming school dropouts. There were 9.9 crore children in total who have dropped out of school (Census 2011). The corona crisis led around 32 crore children stay at home due to closure of schools. Students from classes 9 to 12 were most severely impacted by this lockdown. More than 13 crore children fall in this bracket.

With the current introduction of online classes by both governemnt and private schools, there is a danger of widening disparities in the education sector, especially where access to internet and online services is nonexistent or at the most minimal.

On the whole the lockdown imposed to prevent the spread of Covid -19, has reinforced inequities in society as well as the education system. Unless urgent measures are taken to protect children from hunger, labour and exploitation, violence and abuse and child marriages are likely to increase beyond anyone’s imagination and there is a danger of children falling through the cracks and not enjoying their right to education.

It is in this context that I urge the government to consider the following suggestions to protect their right to education and prevent them from joining the labour force and to prevent child abuse in every form:

1. Government must provide adequate meals including noon meal program and prevent them from hunger as well as child labour during the lock down period.
2. Every Gram Panchayat and Municipal ward should maintain a data base of children aged below 18 years in their constituency and review their status once in a
3. Every gram panchayat and municipal ward should also maintain a database of children who have returned to their villages from their work places and those who have migrated out.
4. Every effort must be made to bring every school going child back to school once they SHG groups, youth and opinion makers in the communities are to be involved in this task.
5. All school dropouts and out of school children be identified and re-enrolled into schools once they Special training should be arranged through accelerated learning methodologies to enable them join age appropriate classes.
6. A full time social volunteer must be placed on the lines of ASHA and Anganwadi volunteers by the concerned governments exclusively to attend to the needs of children. Such volunteers should work in coordination with several departments with the sole aim of facilitating access to all the entitlements of children.
7. Stringent meassures must be adopted to implement Child Labour Act and Child Protection Laws. Number of inspections should be increased. If the existing machinery is not sufficient, the superior officer at Gram Panchayat/Municipal Ward must be designated with the powers of Inspecting Authority to implement these Acts,
8. Market players should develop self-regulatory mechanisms, to ensure that no child labour is used in the production process or in their supply chains. They should enter into agreements with the suppliers that include clauses against the use of child labour in the production of raw material.
9. Governments must seek the support of NGOs as equal partners in their endeavor to abolish child labour and getting every to school. The initiatives of NGOs working for the creation of Child Labour Free Zones must be replicated and taken to scale across the country.

 

Venkat Reddy presented this, on behalf of WNCB, in a webinar of the Alliance 8.7 on child labour and the COVID-19 crisis, on 21 May 2020.