India
Education initiatives
for child workers in India
- M.P. Joseph, IPEC NPC, India
Ranga Reddy District in India's Andhra Pradesh State has all the characteristics of a typical semi-arid dry-land farming area. Its agricultural economy is based on the labour-intensive production of food and cash crops in which women and girls are engaged around the year. The men, mostly underemployed, undertake ploughing, construction work, load-carrying and road-making. Some are on long-term contracts in farm-work to pay off bonded debt.
Things are changing
Most of them are unorganized and bound to the lowly roles assigned to them by an oppressive socio-cultural structure. But things are now changing. In a society in transition, they are now exposed to liberating messages and institutional interventions. Once motivated, they are showing remarkable capacities to assert their rights and to take initiatives to shape a more just society.
Not unexpectedly, Ranga Reddy District is rife with child labour. More than half of its 540,000 children are estimated to be at work: as bonded labourers, farm servants, cattle herders and shepherds; in quarries, domestic service, hotels and small-scale manufacturing and trade.
500 volunteers enlisted
They have an energetic champion, however. Since 1991 the M.Venkatatangaiya Foundation has been working for the abolition of child labour in the district by making mainstream education accessible. With IPEC support, the Foundation is focussing on children working in local factories and on bonded child labour as well as girl child workers in rural areas.
They have enlisted 500 youth volunteers from among the first-generation educated to mobilize parents, teachers and employers to join forces in withdrawing children from work and putting them into schools.
Nine to 14-year-olds are sent to residential camps for four months where they are taught to read and write. Through a "bridge" course they are prepared to enter formal education. By mid-1996, 2,000 children had successfully passed through this process.
As a means of stemming the recruitment of child labour, children aged from five to eight years are enrolled by the Foundation into the regular school system at the start of each school year. This is preceded by an awareness-raising campaign making use of street theatre, child-to-child canvassing, local marches and meetings. A Parent Teachers' Association has been formed to give resource support to government schools and to draw the needs of the community to the attention of administrators. Some 300 government school teachers have formed a Forum for Liberation of Child Labourers, giving valuable support to the project.
Results
The results are impressive. By mid-1996, all the children aged five to eight in 70 villages, and all aged five to 14 in 15 villages, were in school. The latter 15 villages were entirely free of child labour. In all, some 15,000 children have been reached by the Foundation / IPEC operation.
The experience provides important insights:
- a significant impact on child labour can be made only when child labour in agriculture is tackled;- parents, even the economically vulnerable, are not only keen to send their children to school but are willing to make substantial sacrifices to do so - without looking for financial incentives;- this demand for education must be given greater recognition by government policy-makers and educationists; and- the total elimination of child labour can be achieved only when formal education is universalized.
SIDEBAR
The Girl Child - Does she work too hard ?
A Farm Worker Goes to School
Manju, age 15, sits cross-legged on a classroom floor, intensely absorbed in the day's lessons. When the teacher asks a question, she shares her ideas and opinions.
A year ago, Manju was illiterate. A full-time agricultural worker in Hyderabad, India, she worked as a flower picker on the estate of her family's landlord. She put in a 12-hour day, beginning at 5 a.m. and continuing until early evening, earning 28 cents a day. Families in her area are reluctant to educate girls, who are often married off at age 13 and then devote their work and income to the husband's family. Youth volunteers came to villages like Manju's to convince parents to enroll their children in school.
"I used to feel jealous of the girls next door when I saw them going to school every day," says Manju, who started classes a year ago, when a local NGO, the MV Foundation, opened a night school in her village. Manju liked the drop-in classes and decided she wanted to continue her education at a special camp the MV Foundation had set up, just for girls. In addition to room and board, camp students get clean clothes, and schoolbooks.
Manju's decision to begin school at an age when many girls get married angered her older brother. After she enrolled in camp, he went there several times to threaten the staff. Manju, however, stood firm.
"I realized school would be my way out," says Manju, who wants to run her own business some day. "I want to show my brother and the village adults that they are wrong when they say that, being an elder girl, I should not study."
For Manju, the chance to attend school offers her hope that in the future, she can help to move her family out of poverty.
(Excerpted from UNICEF Feature No. 00168)