Daily Times

“There were 14 of us, seven boys and seven girls. Our father was not interested in providing for us; our mother used to work at the local landlord’s house but there was no money. We were poor, truly poor. I cannot remember a single day when we had three or even two meals; on most days, we could only eat once and that too in meagre amounts. During the summer, our mother used to bring peels and rinds of eaten watermelons, which we used to scrape and eat; our mother never ate with us. When I was ten, I started going to the landlord’s house to work, before I left for school in the morning and on the way back. The landlord’s mother used to give me a roti with a bit of butter on it in the morning and I got to eat curry in the evening, something which we could only dream of at home. Ours was a one-room home, barely eight feet long and six feet wide and there were 16 of us in there; sometimes when it rained or the weather got very cold, we had to tie the goat inside with us. We could not afford clothes; it was often that we would wear threadbare shirts without pants. That was poverty.”

As he narrated his story, Ali’s eyes were filled with tears. His mother slogged her life away and managed to send her children to school but they still had to work, sometimes hard labour with no pay. Today, Ali has his own five-marla house.

The international Day against Child Labour was ‘celebrated’ this week; there is nothing to celebrate about child labour so I will say ‘acknowledged’ as an attempt by the International Labour Organization (ILO) to highlight the issue and to muster international support towards the abolition of child labour. After 10 years of marking this day, the ILO hopes to address the violations of fundamental rights of children.

Pakistan has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1990; it is a signatory to the ILO Convention 182 and 138. According to the ILO, there are 215 million children engaged in labour, half in the worst possible forms including slavery, bonded labour, serfdom, child trafficking, drug trafficking, prostitution, pornography and various other forms of exploitation. Mercifully, Pakistan has several laws in place to combat these evils, though more comprehensive ones would certainly be welcome. Article 11 of our Constitution specifically prohibits slavery, forced labour, human trafficking; it states that no child under 14 years of age “shall be engaged in any factory or mine or any other hazardous employment.” Article 25 ensures equality of citizens and grants them equal protection of law, prohibits discrimination and allows special laws to be promulgated with respect to children. Article 25 (A) gives a child the right to education, making it compulsory for ages 5-16 years. Article 37 obligates governments to ensure that there are just and humane conditions of work and children are not employed in vocations unsuited to their age or sex.

Why is there still child labour in our country? Firstly, Pakistan is not the only country faced with this menace. Most of the developing world is confronted with this evil, whereas the developed nations are facing issues like child exploitation, trafficking and pornography. Even the international organisations involved realise that child labour will not go away simply by waving a magic wand and has to be addressed systematically, focusing on the worst forms first. Secondly, unless and until we manage to eradicate or considerably alleviate poverty in our country, or for that matter the world, child labour will be there as a cheaper form of labour for the employer and as a means of extra income, however inadequate, for poor families. Thirdly, in order to stop children from being used as labour, we need to stop producing them; the population explosion in poverty-stricken countries as ours places an additional burden on meagre and limited resources. Maybe it is time to offer incentives to have smaller families so each child has a better quality of life instead of being deprived of his/her childhood.

The way to combat child labour is to do what the ILO is doing for the past 93 years: work on a tripartite basis with employers, employees and the government. Awareness and social dialogue is the key. Making employers cognizant of their duties will ensure that no children are employed in the supply chains. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has prompted companies and trade unions in countries like Ghana, Argentina, Moldova and India to take initiatives that have resulted in children having been taken out from labour and put into schools or various programmes, to educate and equip them with vocational training, to enable them to join the workforce when they become adults. These programmes also provide midday meals to children, which serves as an incentive for the family to send their child there. Similarly, the international community refused to buy footballs stitched by children employed by factory owners in Sialkot, forcing the employers to stop the practice by signing an agreement in 1997. Pakistan used to account for 75 percent of the world’s total football supply. We still need our children to be taken out from bonded labour in mines, brick kilns and the carpet industry.

The Punjab government established Child Protection Bureaus under the Punjab Neglected and Destitute Children’s Act (PNDC), which resulted in children having been taken off the streets or rescued from exploitation, neglect and abuse. Even then there are plenty left out there who are held captive by organised crime rackets, which kidnap, maim and exploit them and are beyond the law, having influence in places that matter. Pakistan is also faced with the additional burden of Afghan refugees and children affected by the massive earthquake of 2005 and the horrific floods in recent years. The children orphaned or abandoned by such calamities need to be rehabilitated and protected.

There are laws. There is need to have new laws. However, the entire purpose of having a particular law fails if there is no implementation. The problem lies not with the lack of laws but with the enforcement of existing ones. Corruption has destroyed our country. If everybody did the work they were supposed to do, we would not be in such a mess. Why are children still working in factories and other hazardous jobs in spite of prohibitions? What are the labour inspectors and others responsible for implementation of the law doing? Obviously, it is not what they are supposed to be doing. It is the government’s job to ensure that these people are held accountable for their acts of omission and commission; and it is the duty of every citizen to report such violations to the authorities or to the vibrant media for immediate attention.

Ali never knew childhood. Today, 215 million children will never know what it means to be a child. We employ child domestic labour; we make them work the way we would never our own child. We feed them leftovers of our children; we leave them hungry when we take our children out to eat, making them feed our obese child. We make them carry huge loads, pots, pans, buckets; we do not send them to school as we do our children; we let them work with fire, with boiling water, with a hot iron, as we would never let our children. We wake them up early but not sleep early, as we would never do to our children. Are we monsters or just hypocritical? It is time to take responsibility and to stop passing the buck.

The writer is an advocate of the high court