Bonded for life
- From: ano457@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 25 Dec 2005 07:03:07 -0800
Bonded for life
Friday December 23 2005 13:36 IST
Vimala Ramachandran
In the course of my work as a researcher on elementary education I have
come across many situations that leave me numb. Like in a recent field
visit to Andhra Pradesh, where I was informed that young prepubescent
girls are taken out of school so they can pollinate cottonseed farms.
When I asked why there was a preference for prepubescent girls, one
farmer said it was because they believed that if young girls did the
pollination it would result in good crop. A local woman activist told
me this was a new myth propagated by cottonseed growers in order to
justify employing young girls.
The production of hybrid cottonseed is labour intensive, complex and
time-dependent. Unlike other hybrid seeds such as paddy and jowar,
cross-pollination work in cottonseed has to be done manually. Each
individual flower bud has to be emasculated and pollinated by hand,
requiring a large labour force... this activity alone requires about 90
percent of the total labour days.
Thousands of children are employed in cotton fields, not just in Andhra
Pradesh, but in Gujarat and Karnataka as well. An Udaipur-based social
activist informed me that girls are taken from Rajasthan to Gujarat for
work in the fields. Labour contractors fix the wages for the whole
season and hand it over to the parents. The girls are then transported
by the contractors and the farmers bear the cost of their boarding and
lodging - mostly in temporary sheds at the farms. Not only are they
forced to work in the farms but what is worse is that the children
breathe the polluted fumes emanating from a liberal use of fertilisers
and pesticides. They live, eat and sleep in an unhealthy environment
with potentially harmful effects on their respiratory as well as
reproductive health.
The MV Foundation estimates that in Andhra alone there are 150,000
children in the seven to fourteen age group who are employed in fields
-and 90 percent are girls. They are mostly employed in Mahbubnagar and
Kurnool districts, where almost 14,000 acres of land is used for hybrid
cottonseed production. The report also estimates that if we take the
country as a whole, nearly 400,000 children are employed in the
cottonseed industry across the country.
Cottonseed production is a lucrative business and is promoted by local
(legal and illegal) as well as multinational cottonseed companies. The
illegal seed growers are perhaps as many as the legal ones.
Why adults, when children work longer
Adult labour is often substituted with child labour (for reasons well
known - young girls and boys cost far less, are more compliant and work
longer hours) when farmers and middlemen are confident that the
regulatory mechanism is slack.
Almost two and a half decades ago the prevalence of child labour in the
carpet industry attracted a lot of national as well as international
attention. Efforts were made to get consumers to shun products made
from child labour. Similarly child labour in the glass, bangles,
brassware and gem polishing industries have been highlighted on and off
by the media. Unfortunately as media attention wanes business returns
to normal.
The situation in Andhra Pradesh has been a bit different. Organisations
like M V Foundation have campaigned for the right of every child to
education for almost two decades now. They pioneered the bridge course
model to get children out of work and into schools and have kept up the
pressure year after year.
But despite the continuous advocacy for the right to education of every
child the employment of children (especially girls) in the cottonseed
industry continues. Travelling across Andhra Pradesh, it is not very
difficult to understand why this happens.
First, the work in cottonseed farms is seasonal and young girls are
pulled out of school for six to eight weeks. So, formally, many of
these children are enrolled in school. Second, girls are handed over to
labour contractors who transport them and house them in temporary
sheds. As children are taken from one district to another to work,
keeping track of their movement is difficult and localised efforts to
do not always succeed preventing the employment of children. Tracking
the movement of children across district borders (or even across state
borders) is also not so easy and the labour contractors are able to
evade detection.
Third, discussions with parents reveal that they feel children are not
learning much in schools and given the poor quality of education, a few
weeks of absence is not taken very seriously. While they admit that
many children who are absent for long periods are not able to cope with
the studies and eventually drop out, they also point out that even
children who are regular do not learn anything and they also eventually
drop out.
Not just in farms, at home too
This is not the only kind of work children do in rural India. Walk into
any village to find children working alongside their parents in the
fields or joining they parents engaged in wage labour. Girls from poor
families work before and after school - cleaning, cooking, washing and
minding siblings. They get very little time to study or even for
leisure. Boys in Andhra Pradesh told us how they are sent on short-term
bondage to pay off loans- their parents' loans. The electronic media
recently highlighted the plight of domestic servants in Hyderabad,
where thousands of young girls from impoverished rural households are
sent to work in urban areas.
On one level, a state like Andhra Pradesh is celebrated as being in the
forefront of the technological revolution, but on another, new myths
and practices have emerged wherein children are made to work long hours
in miserable conditions and in potentially poisonous environments.
The media needs to track these instances of blatant violation of the
human rights of children. Equally, enforcing the Right to Education now
demands of the state very stringent action against the nexus of seed
companies, farmers and contractors. A sustained campaign is necessary
to tackle this problem, with the media and education activists joining
hands to ensure children realise they have a right to childhood.
.
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