Today
I want to talk about the problem about the child labour. In the world, for
millions of children there is no time to be a child. Work fills the day.
Millions of them produce goods for the consumers in developed country. Children
work to help their families, to pay for school and survive. The contribution of
a child's income or labor at home can move a family from hunger to sufficiency.
Parents of child workers are often unemployed or underemployed, desperate for a
secure job and income. Yet it is often their children who are offered jobs,
because children are cheaper and easier to exploit.
The
International Labour Organization (ILO) defines child Labour as:
1- When a child
is working during early age
2- He overworks
or gives over time to Labor
3- He works due
to the psychologically, socially, and materialistic pressure
4- He becomes
ready to Labour on a very low pay
The
problem about the children at work because mothers could not choose, they would
want them to be in school. But what stops them is poverty. Even when the whole
family works, their total income can be less than dollar a day. If a child
cannot study, then the cycle of poverty is repeated and the poor family will
never get out of the slum. But there are not enough schools for poor children.
Even if there is a school, and a poor family cannot afford to pay the fees for
few years, children often drop out.
In
Pakistan children aged 5-14 are above 40 million .During the last year, the
Federal
Bureau of
Statistics released the
results of its
survey funded by ILO’s IPEC
(International
Program on the Elimination of Child Labour). The findings were that 3.8 million
children age group of 5-14 years are working in Pakistan out of total 40
million children in this age group; fifty percent of these economically active
children are in age group of 5 to 9 years. Even out of these 3.8 million
economically active children, 2.7 million were claimed to be working in the
agriculture sector.
Now we can easily imagine in the light of above
mentioned facts and figures how the nation’s future namely children are
deprived of pleasures of life, ignorance has
reduced
their abilities of thinking right or differentiating between right and wrong,
as well as their life-chances, to their non-access to education.
The
present government in Pakistan has made elementary education compulsory. Along
with this, the government has distributed free books in primary schools so that
parents, who cannot afford their children’s school expenses, send their
children to schools. The major point is that this decision must be acted upon
at all levels. There is strict need to stop child Labour in this country.
Awareness must be raised and the attention of parents ought to be diverted to
the education of their children. Child Labour Laws should be put into practice
strictly.
