Revision summary
Child labour recurs because of household need, contractor chains and caste-typed work. Enforcement must join child-labour law with RTE and joint liability of contractors. Adult wages, meals, hostels and raid-linked social security replace the child’s income. Migrant-portable schooling and bridge courses keep rescued children in class. Stigmatised caste occupations and girls’ unpaid work need named targeting.
Model answer
Introduction
Child labour in India returns because households need the wage, employers need cheap flexible hands, and caste still sorts who is ‘available’ as a child worker. Actionable measures must close the labour market to children and open a livable school-and-wage path to adults.
Body
Law that works on the ground
- Enforce the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016, and the Right to Education Act together: rescue without a seat in school is a round trip to the kiln.
- Treat trafficking corridors, brick kilns, cotton seed plots, domestic work, and roadside eateries as inspection priorities, not only registered factories.
- Make principal employers and contractors jointly liable, because A. R. Desai’s class chain hides the child behind a labour contractor.
- Fast-track rehabilitation funds so a released child eats this week, not after a file moves.
Household economics
- Raise and actually pay adult minimum wages in the sectors that currently run on child hands.
- Expand reliable midday meals, hostels, and scholarships for first-generation learners, especially Dalit and Adivasi children who Srinivas’s village still places at the well’s edge.
- Link MGNREGA and social security to households identified in child-labour raids so the adult replaces the child’s income.
School as a labour-market rival
- NEP-era foundational literacy only helps if the teacher is present and the child is not seasonal migrant; portable admissions for migrant children are an actionable device.
- Bridge courses for older children who have missed years, so age shame does not push them back to work.
- Community boards, including women’s groups, to name missing children the way Operation Barga named unrecorded tenants: publicity plus record.
Caste, gender, and demand
- Target occupations historically tied to caste stigma, where children inherit work as destiny rather than as a short crisis.
- Treat girls’ domestic and farm labour as labour, not as training for marriage.
- Ban and prosecute hazardous home-based piecework that uses children for export and domestic value chains.
Culture of enforcement
- Public names of repeat employers, as courts have sometimes done, change honour more than a quiet fine.
- Train panchayats and police against the idea that ‘poor children must help’.
- Beteille’s equality as a value has to reach the workshop, not only the textbook.
What not to do
- Do not romanticise ‘family learning of craft’ when it is full-time wage substitution.
- Do not make the child a criminal; the employer and the missing public school are the problem.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD W[Adult wages social security] --> X[Child not needed as earner] S[RTE bridge migrant seats] --> X E[Joint liability inspection] --> Y[Employer cannot hide child] X --> Z[Curb recurrence] Y --> Z
Conclusion
Recurrent child labour ends when adult wages, school seats, and inspector power meet at the same household. Statutes already exist. The actionable core is to make the legal child more expensive to hire than a paid adult, and safer to keep in school.
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