Born to Work: Child Labour in India 0195640977

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LABOUR IN IND I

Born to Work Child Labour in India

Born to Work Child Labour in India

Neera Burra

DELHI

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CALCUTTA CHENNAI

MUMBAI

Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associates in Berlin Ibadan

© Oxford University Press 1995 First published 1995 Oxford India Paperbacks 1997 Second impression 1998 ISBN O 19 564097 7

Typeset by Rastrixi, New Delhi 110070 Printed in India at Rekha Printers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi 110020 and published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 00 I

For Sundar ... without whom this book could never have been written

Contents Foreword by Myron Weiner

ix

Acknowledgements

xv

Glossary

xvii

Child Labour in Some Sectors in India

xxii

1.

How it all started . . . Government Policy and the Law

2.

Where are Children Working?

3. 4.

Children in the Glass Industry Child Labour in the Lock Industry of Aligarh

5.

The Child Gem Polishers of Jaipur

7.

Why Children Work in the Brass Ware Industry

6. The Child Potters of Khurja 8.

Traditional Crafts and Child Labour

9.

The Female Child

10.

Consequences of Child Labour: Education and Health

11.

What can be done ... Bibliography Index Photographs following page 150

1 11 35 55 79 110 140 191 204 223 243 257 270

l

Foreword ust one hundred years ago, in the last decade of the nine­

teenth century, an American non-governmental organiza­ tion called the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) conducted a series of studies on child labour in U.S. industries. These studies - which now occupy several feet of shelf space in Harvard's Weidner Library - documented the plight of America's working children. The social activists and scholars who prepared these studies described the conditions for children in the textile, cigarette, glass, and other industries throughout the country. The NCLC used these studies as part of its campaign to appeal to the conscience of Americans and to lobby state legislatures to extend the age of compulsory education (in 1900 education was compulsory up to age four­ teen in only 31 states) and to ban the employment of children. Through their efforts state governments extended the years of compulsory schooling and introduced the system of 'working papers', or employment certificates which permitted young people to work only after they had completed at least six years of schooling and were over fourteen years of age. The NCLC was also instrumental in getting national legislation passed to supersede weak state government laws on child labour. A similar campaign is now under way in India to pass stricter child labour laws and to introduce compulsory primary school education. While there is no national Non-Governmental Or­ ganization (NGO) in India to compare to the NCLC, a small band of social activists, journalists, scholars, and film makers have been hard at work appealing to the conscience of officials

X

Born to Work

and to the Indian public. Meera Nair, in a much acclaimed prize winning film, Salaam Bombay, poignantly portrayed the life of Bombay's street children. Smithu Kothari, Manu Kulkarni and Harbans Singh have described conditions for children in the notorious match industry in Sivakasi. Sheela Barse and Debasish Chatterji have written articles on children in the glass industry. Articles on the plight of children have appeared in Frontline, India Today, and in India's leadin9 dailies. But few people have been as persistent and indefatigable in describing the conditions of working children as Neera Burra, a research scholar earlier on the staff of the International Labour Organization and now the Coordinator of the Sub-Regional Programme, South Asia, for United Nations Volunteers. Since 1986 she has been study­ ing the lives of children in some of the major industries that employ child labour: the brass ware industry in Moradabad, pottery making in Khurja, gem polishing in Jaipur, lock making in Aligarh, and glass factories in Firozabad. These studies pro­ vide us with the most documented account we now have of child labour in India. The book you are about to read draws from her remarkable field investigations. Burra spent weeks in each of her sites, interviewing children, employers, and officials, carefully de­ scribing the industrial processes on which children labour, the hours they work, the wages they are paid, and the health and safety hazards which they endure. She has pulled together the best data available on the number of children in each industry, their age on entering the labour force, and what happens to them as they grow older. Her prose is factual and unemotional, but her central theme is unmistakable: child labour in India is rampant and state policies to protect children are poorly con­ ceived and badly enforced. Children in India, at any age, are legally permitted to work in small scale industries, though there are supposed to be restrictions on their employment in hazardous work. In each industry she surveyed, Burra found children engaged in work that is unsafe and unhealthy. In the lock industry children work with potassium cyanide, trisodium phosphate, sodium silicate,

Foreword

xi

hydrochloric acid and sulphuric acid. They inhale noxious fumes, are exposed to electric shocks, and suffer from tuber­ culosis, bronchitis, asthma and other diseases. In the brass ware industry, children work at high temperature furnaces and inhale the dust prod\lCed in polishing. In pottery, too, children suffer from respiratory illnesses from inhaling clay dust. The glass industry is particularly hazardous since children carry molten glass and work around furnaces with intense heat. Even when children are not employed in hazardous work, the environment itself often puts children at risk. Household employment is not normally dangerous, but children as domestic servants are often beaten and sexually abused, and children employed in dhabas are at the mercy of their employers. Officials and employers argue that the children are serving as apprentices, acquiring needed skills for adult employment, contributing to the income of their families, and are mainly employed as part of family labour. They further argue that the employment of children sustains India's traditional craft­ oriented industries and that child labour makes India's exports more competitive. Neera Burra's case studies refute each of these arguments. In the lock industry in Aligarh and in the brass ware industry in Moradabad she reports that children are not working side by side with their parents. Though unit owners claim that they employ their own children, Burra finds that this is rarely so. Children supplementing family income? In the pottery industry, she reports children are employed in spite of high levels of adult unemployment. Here and in other industries adults are being displaced by children, who are invariably paid less. 'Simp­ ly put,' she writes, 'employers prefer child labour because it is cheaper than adult labour and because children, unlike adults, cannot question the treatment meted out to them. Evidence indicates that the child's wage in any industry is a third to half that of an adult for the same output, with the child working for as many, if not more, hours than the adult.' It is often because wages are kept low for adults that families are forced to send their children into the labour forFe.

xii

Born to Work

Training? 'These children are not being trained, they are being used,' she quotes a master craftsman in the gem industry in Jaipur. In the industries she studied, artisans have been transformed into factory workers. Glass bangle-making and glass blowing are no longer hereditary occupations and the children employed in them are not acquiring special skills. In the lock industry children work on buffing machines, electroplating, spray painting, filing components, making springs, assembling and packing locks. No skills are required that could not be easily learned by adults. She also reports that there is no evidence that children are capable of weaving better carpets than adults and no evidence that children (with their so-called nimble fingers) are better able to perform tasks in any industry better than adults. One of her most heart rending findings is that early entrance into the labour force has shortened the working lives of many young people who, now as adults, are too ill to remain in the labour force. Adults in Firozabad who used to work around the furnaces in the glass industry as children, said that they had to send their own children into the labour force since they themselves were now unable to work. The children of the poor, she writes, have become 'an expendable commodity.' One of her most interesting findings is that child labour is not enhancing India's ability to compete in exports, an argu­ ment used by government officials to justify the creation of government centres for the training of children as weavers in the carpet industry, and for the employment of children in the brass ware and gem industries, three of India's most successful export industries. Burra compares a brass ware factory in Moradabad with a brass ware factory she visited in Bangkok, a highly successful export-oriented factory where children were not employed and where the level of technology was more sophisticated than in Moradabad. Unlike Thai businessmen, she reports, Moradabad businessmen have no incentive to acquire new technologies since they can employ low wage children. Child labour in India has reduced the need for technological innovation, so essential to the expansion of exports. Finally, she reports that child labour is keeping children out

Foreword

xiii

of school, and contributing to the growth of illiteracy, especially among girls. Employers in the carpet industry, with government support, compete with the schools for the children. School-age children are recruited by dalals or middlemen who belong to the same villages and earn a commission for bringing child workers. In Moradabad, she reports, practically none of the children she met had ever attended school. Employers are par­ ticularly eager to employ young girls, since they are paid less than boys, and are often employed at younger ages. In the match industry in Sivakasi, most of the child workers are girls below the age of fourteen, and their wages are well below the agricul­ tural wages in the region. In every industry she studied, in coir, papads, gems, beedis, locks, carpets, embroidery, girls are paid less than boys and are employed in the jobs requiring the lowest skills. Given the low female attendance in primary schools, is it any wonder that female literacy is so low in India? The 1991 census reported that the percentage of adult female literates to the total female population remained under 40 per cent in Andhra Pradesh (33.7 per cent), Orissa (34.4 per cent), Madhya Pradesh (28.4 per cent), Bihar (23.1 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (26.0 per cent), Rajasthan (20.8 per cent) and Arunachal Pradesh (29.4 per cent), states with a high incidence of child labour. There is, writes Burra, a web of illiteracy and exploita­ tion - uneducated parents send their children to work, who as illiterate adults then send their own children to work. India is the largest producer of non-school-going child workers. Estimates of the number of children under age fifteen in the labour force range from an official government figure of 17. 4 million to a high of 44 million by a respected non-govern­ ment research organization. Most child workers in India are illiterate while in nineteenth century England and in the United States, child workers were at least able to read and write since they were generally in school for six years, the period of com­ pulsory education. In India most child workers have never attended school or have dropped out before completing four years of schooling, the minimum neede9 to acquire literacy.

xiv

Born to Work

What can be done to end child labour in India? Burra does not spell out detailed policy solutions, but, frankly, she need not. A government that is committed to removing its children from the labour force and placing them in primary schools can do it. It has been done before by other poor countries - by many European countries in the eighteenth century, by Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, and in our time by Korea, Taiwan, the Peoples Republic of China, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Primary school budgets can be in­ creased (perhaps at the cost of free higher education for India's middle classes), primary schooling can be made compulsory, and child labour laws can be extended and enforced. In India, concludes Burra, 'universal primary education is not given the importance it deserves. Instead many government programmes offer palliatives like adult literacy programmes and the estab­ lishment of model schools catering largely to the rural elite, rather than tackle frontally the need for a good basic education.' The Indian government has the capacity to make education compulsory and to bring an end to the kind of child labour conditions described in this book. What is lacking is the political leadership that is prepared to do what is necessary. Ford International Professor of Political Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge Massachusetts

MYRON WEINER

Acknowledgements

M

y professional interest in the issue of child labour ':as _ kmdled because of Dr Walter Fernandes of the Indian Social Institute who gave me the opportunity to study child labour in India. He asked me to write a report based on secondary sources on the subject. But soon it was clear, that we had to go beyond. The Government of India was preparing for a new legislation to protect children which we thought was ·untimely. Walter gave me complete freedom to take whatever direction I wanted. He not only gave me the opportunity to get involved, but supported a field trip to study the glass industry of Firozabad. I am indebted to him. The late Tara Ali Baig and Professor Dharma Kumar have been my mentors in the field. Tara Ali Baig encouraged me at a time when child labour issues were not particularly media­ worthy: she gave my findings publicity in the various govern­ mental committees of which she was a member. Professor Dharma Kumar not only took the trouble of reading several versions of the manuscript, but needled me frequently about publishing the research. Her comments were very valuable. And if the book is now in print, I owe it largely to Dharma who kept the pressure on! I am deeply indebted to UNICEF, 110, DANIDA and UNESCO for supporting my research on child labour. UNICEF supported the research on child labour in the lock industry of Aligarh and child labour in the gem polishing industry ofJaipur. 110/ARTEP supported the study on child labour in the brass ware industry of Moradabad. DANIDA supported the research on child potters

xvi

Born to Work

of Khurja and UNESCO commissioned me to write a report on child labour and education in Asia. Without the financial sup­ port of these agencies, this research would not have been possible. Some of these reports have appeared in abridged forms in the Economic and Political Weekry. EPW gave me the oppor­ tunity to share some of my earlier findings at a time when not much was being written about child labour. I am grateful. The opinions expressed in this book are my own. I cannot pretend to have all, or even some of the answers. What I have tried to do is to present the material in ways which would avoid sensationalism. I have very strong feelings about the role of compulsory education in the elimination of child labour, a feeling not shared by many. I hope that this book can encourage a debate on this issue. NEERA BURRA New Delhi 1994

Glossary agarbatti amani auraton-ka-kaam

incense sticks monthly wages women's work

bakerywala beedis/bidis belan belanwala bhatti bigha bindai-ka-kaam

owner of the bakery local cigarettes rolling pin the man who rotates the belan furnace a unit for measuring land piercing holes in beads

charpai chilai chimta chulha coolies

bed scraping tongs stove porters

dalals darja datja bhatti dhabas dhalai dhalaiya dhol

middlemen/brokers box moulding system box mould furnace small way-side eating places moulder moulder drum. This is a term used for drum polish­ ing a term used to describe a flat and small box

dibbi

xviii

Born to Work

duniya dari

ways of the world

gali gali-mohalla

lane all-embracing term used to describe a residential locality and its lanes and by­ lanes (see mohalla) crucible the person who melts the raw material in the graphite crucible rough cut stone the person who makes the rough shape round ingots

ghadiya ghadiyawala ghat ghat bananewala gulli halwai hath-gadi haveli hookah

sweetmeat shop owner hand cart mansion tobacco-pipe with a long tube passing through water for cooling the smoke

inam

gift

jagaiya

the person whose responsibility it is to wake up workers on night shifts. He is.also the man who recruits labour for the factory owner a term used to refer to bonded labourers mainly in South India an instrument used for polishing gem stones a term used for landlords in Bengal to join unregistered small units where bangles are joined over acetylene flames

jeeta/jeeta gadus Jindra jotedars judai judai addas kabana karkhana karkhanedar katai

bow used for the polishing of gem stones workshop, also used for a factory owner of a karkhana work on the jigger jolly machine

Glossary katai addas kataiwala kathai kathai-ka-kaam khandani pesha khet mazdoor khula mazdoor kulhads kumbhars labya loam lungis/thehmats malik marking karnewala/ nishan laganewala masala mohalla munim muthauthanewala

xix

unregistered units where designs are cut on bangles the worker who makes pots on the jigge; jolly machine a particular type of polishing work done polishing work (hereditary) traditional occupation agricultural labourer casual labourer clay cups potters the 7-foot iron rod used for carrying molten glass molten glass a long cloth wrapped around the waist, worn by men employer/owner the person in charge of grading and mark­ ing the gem stone a term used for describing a mix of in­ gredients residential locality, usually a closely clustered group of houses, in the older parts of cities and towns accountant the man who removes the spring of hot bangles from the belan

nagine ka karigar netagiri nimbu

gem stone artisan politicking lemon

pakai bhatti

a unit where bangles are baked in layers on metal sheets covered with silica sand the person who places trays of bangles into the furnace and also stokes it

pakaiwala

XX

paldaras panja pankha pankhawala pannaiyal papad phanti phantiwala polishwala pudias purdah

Born to Work casual labourers the fork used for weaving literally means fan. In this context it is the rotation of the wheel which is called a pankha to keep the furnace fire burning the persons who fans the furnace a term used to describe bonded labour in the southern States of India an Indian savoury piece of wood on which five or six moulds are kept the boys who carry the phanti polisher small packets the seclusion of women amongst the Mus­ lims

rotis

whole wheat bread

saggars

fire resistant containers in which unbaked pots are baked small clay pots a term used to describe the rich, a term often used for landlords, owners of workshops and factories a shoe polishing kit

sakuras seth shoe-polish-ka­ samaan sigri silli surahis taarkash tehsil/taluka thandibattiwala

small coal stove oblong ingot earthen pitchers used for keeping water for drinking the man who threads hot glass onto a roll­ ing pin an administrative unit of the district the person who carries the molten glass after it is beaten into shape, back to the furnace

Glossary thehmats theka thekedars toras truckwala

see under lungis contract contractors strings of 312 bangles truck driver

unionbaji ustad uthai rakhai

unionizing master pick up and put down

:tari

gold thread embroidery

xxi

Child Labour in Some Sectors in India Location

Industry

Total Workers

Child Workers

Percentage of Child Workers to Total Workers

1,ooob

8.3

Slate Pencil

Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh

12,oooa

Slate

Markapur, Andhra Pradesh

15,000C app. 3750

Diamond-cutting

Surat, Gujarat

Agate-cutting

Cambay, Gujarat

Gem polishing

Jaipur, Rajasthan

25

ct

15,000C

f

30,000

not known

60,000

13,60� h

5

i

33.3

100,ooo

15,000

15 22.6

Powerloom

Bhiwandi, Maharashtra

300,000

Cotton hosiery

Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu

30,000

8,000

Carpet-weaving

Mirzapur-Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh

200,000

150,000i

75

Carpet-weaving

Jammu and Kashmir

app. 400,000

100,oook

25

Carpet-weaving

Rajasthan

30,000

12,0001

40

Industry

Location

Total Workers

Child Workers

Lock-making

Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh

80,000 90,000

Pottery

Khurja, Uttar Pradesh

20,000

5,000°

Brass Ware

Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh

150,000

40,000° 45,000

Match

Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu

Glass

Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh

Silk and silk products Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

7,0oom 10,000

Percentage of Child Workers to Total Workers 8.7

11.1 25

26.6 30.0

not known

45,000P

-

200,000

50,000q

25

1 1,900

4,409r

37

3,5 12

1 , 1 085

3 1 .5

Textile

Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

Knives

Rampur, Uttar Pradesh

Handicrafts

Jammu amd Kashmir

Silk weaving

Bihar

not known

10,ooow

Brocade and Zari industry

Varanasi and other centres, Uttar Pradesh

not known

300,00