Campaign Against Child Labour

AID - Jharkhand (Giridih Chapter )

 

Campaign on elimination of child labour AID believes that the elimination of child labour is a desirable long-term change. For the present generation of child labourers, however, there is the need to provide basic education and alternative skills training.

Furthermore, it is most important for the parents to realise their responsibility towards this end and for the government to provide employment avenues to the poor. There is also a need to prevent the future generation of children getting trapped by the same tentacles of child labour. Towards these long-term goals, several workshops and conventions have been organised at the village, panchayat, district and State levels. The carpet children, scrap mica pickers, agricultural child labour, animal grazers, and forest produce pickers have been the prime target of the projects AID is already running for educational and other issue based programs. The recently concluded Child labourers convention in Patna in April 99 has been the culmination of the various efforts towards the campaign on elimination of child labour in Chotanagpur tribal belt of Bihar. Around 5000 children participated in this convention. The uniqueness of this convention being that the children and parents spent their own resources to participate in this convention. The villagers and the members of the community together collected funds and decided to send a few children from each of their respective villages. The children carried out the entire proceedings of the convention. The school children in Patna came to realise the plight of these children in villages and volunteered to provide lunch to all these children by each school child bringing lunch for one child. Thus the cream of the society were also enlightened about the plight of child labour. The children also fasted in demand of the implementation of programs
meant for them and enabling of the district administration to look into their plight and provide alternative avenues.
The campaign, which was mounted at the grassroots level, took off to the state level and this is only the first step towards the goal of elimination of child labour. The campaign higlighted the hollowness of the legislations against
child labour. Pressure was mounted to government to implment the current laws seriously. This led to the investigation and tervention of the labour department in garwah . public support was sought to challenge the government’s inaction.