Our response in India

India is home to the largest child labour force in the world; 35 million according to UNICEF, accounting for about 14% of children in the 5-14 age group. Unofficial figures vary between 60 to 100 million.

Children are involved in many types of labour, which include many forms of ‘bonded labour’ (labour as continuous debt repayment) as well as children working in exploitative work or hazardous conditions. Recently Save the Children has highlighted the dangers attached to child domestic work.

They work in glass manufacturing, leather tanning, footwear industries, stone quarries, gem stones and manufacturing. Many work unacceptably long hours, often in unsafe conditions or with minimal respect for their rights.

Save the Children has a particular focus on child domestic work, one of the most prevalent forms of child labour in India, in which children work in other people’s homes, often away from their families and always behind closed doors. There are around 50,000 child domestic workers in Kolkata alone. Our research reveals that child domestic workers are routinely subjected to abuse, including:

• unsafe working conditions
• lack of food
• being beaten, deliberately burnt or sexually abused.

Urban and rural strategies

In West Bengal, Save the Children works with partner organisations Right Track in the city of Kolkata and Jay Prakash Institute for Social Change (JPISC) in the rural town and surrounding villages or Midnapore. These organisations both work to help children avoid being exploited and put at risk through domestic work.

Right Track has helped some of the children to go back to their homes, usually in the rural areas. When that is not possible, they have persuaded employers to treat the girls well, giving breaks, paying them a better wage, and allowing them to attend some schooling, even if this cannot be full time.

JPISC works in Midnapore, one of the rural areas where girls come from to work in the city. It works with families and the girls themselves to provide other alternatives, such as tailoring or beautician skills. It also helps warn of the dangers of going alone to a house in the city, because often, young people are drawn to domestic work in the city by false promises. Sadly in many cases the problems occur because the families simply cannot earn a sufficient living, and so we have to always keep tackling the root cause of poverty in any way possible.

Save the Children aims to show good examples of how to address this issue so that others can follow, as the scale of child domestic work across the country is huge and other partners are needed for full impact to be made. One very important goal is to make child domestic work ‘socially unacceptable’ and create much greater awareness of the risks to children and the importance of their rights. Some of the public information films shown in India are available to the Eye to Eye project and will appear in our resources. Our partner organisations run peer groups for the girls, gather case studies and testimonies (such as those gathered in Eye to Eye) and interact with employers and parents directly over the issue.