As part of the overall strategy for eliminating and preventing child labour in India, aid agencies seek to increase economic security to the families who withdraw their children from hazardous work by encouraging savings and alternative livelihoods. Since most of the parents of child labourers work in the informal sectors with irregular incomes they lack economic security.
Child labour is viewed in India not as a labour problem but as a development issue requiring multi-sectoral interventions and civil society partnership. Active district leadership is therefore considered crucial in the implementation of activities to reduce child labour. In some districts, mothers of child workers enrolled in formal schools, transitional education centres and vocational training centres are organized into Self-Help Groups (SHGs). SHGs were formed with the specific objective of providing economic security to the child worker families in order that the need for the child’s earnings is obviated. In order to assist the families in increasing their incomes, two specific activities are offered:
(i) facilitating the availability of credit; and
(ii) training for the acquisition of skills for alternative livelihoods.
SHG members receive training on income generation activities. Each member of the SHG is encouraged to regularly save and the group’s savings are pooled into a revolving fund into which the government would match the amount. On completing six months of savings the groups become eligible to receive the matching amount. In fact the government aims to arrange loans and subsidies under various government schemes and provide for revolving funds in coordination with a lead bank of the district.
From a sub-study by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on the impact of income generation activities in selected areas, it was observed that in the district Virudhnagar in Tamil Nadu state there appears to have been a very positive impact. The dependence on money lenders has been substantially reduced (the numbers were reduced to almost half of what they were prior to the SHG activity); credit from the banks was made available to SHG members in addition to the loan facility from the SHG’s own fund; and the group also managed to have substantial savings. The earnings of the members also registered an increase of around 50%.
The sub-study indicated that the large number of SHG members who were given training in new career areas (almost all the mothers of the group in Jalna & Aligarh districts) had not used the new skills learned since they continued to do what they were doing prior to the training. In the Virudhnagar district there was greater awareness and clarity among the members and only 20% opted for skills training; the rest wanted to continue with existing activities. It could be inferred that new skills training for mothers is perhaps not a critical factor and an occupational shift by itself is not desirable or possible in most cases. In any case, such activities cannot be planned for all the members. Rather, training in career areas and trades could be needs-based.
It appears that interventions have been successful only in localized pockets where enabling environments existed. Successful poverty alleviation interventions could be studied to give guidance to understand the broader dimensions of the problem of child labour. The question of most child worker families not falling under the ‘Below Poverty Line’ (BPL) category also needs to be studied more closely to see whether they are erroneously left out due to migration, or other reasons, or whether their non-inclusion is on account of their ineligibility. The two cases would call for different actions.
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