Indian government has banned employment of children below 14 years a long back ago in 2006. The penalty for flouting the law is a jail term ranging from three month to 2 years with or without fine that could range from 10,000 to 20,000. But that doesn’t seem to have left any impact on our country or its people even after 3 years of its implementation. So where did we go wrong? These days too we can notice lot of kids working in dhaba’s, small shops, or on the railway stations. Children of age 8-10 can be frequently seen in trains cleaning the birth and near by area. It looks like if the law was just made on papers, and was never a serious concern of either the government or the law makes who essentially came with this. We can still give explanation for some uneducated people, (like people from small shops or dhaba’s employing these kids for the reason that the government failed to create awareness about its new law that prevent kids below 14 from working). But what about our so called learned people…..I had my interview in ITM business school; I went to Mumbai via train. Throughout my journey I saw several kids below 14 selling tea, fruits etc…..but I was surprised to see a toddler within the campus of business school. They say they are grooming leaders for tomorrow, I don’t know what type of leaders they are preparing by employing a kid who is still in his child hood and almost certainly may not know what does leaders of tomorrow means. A business school has people who are very knowledgeable, scholarly and socially responsible. Then how can they close their eyes to this? They simply talk of teaching corporate social responsibility to young managers…Is this the sort of corporate responsibility they are teaching? A business school charges a single student somewhere between 8 to 12 lakh every year. By that figure it must be earning a good amount in a year bearing in mind its student intake capacity to its various courses. Can’t they employ any young man above 14 who is on the lookout for work? (Generally kids are paid less) They earn so much of money that they can finance that child education….but that is just my imagination because I know it will never happen. But still I have a ray of hope from them that one day they will wake up to this and will not at least take a kid’s childhood from him. It doesn’t end with that college. Still in many offices you can see kids serving tea…etc…..
We are educated; we understand what a childhood means. We can feel it…we have gone through it. We are socially responsible, financially independent...… Moreover we are well informed about this……and we know that we are capable of bringing this change.
Still no one is doing anything….These issues most of the times go unreported by media…..They will report everything including what Indian cricketers did eat? They will report whether kareena put the lipstick or not? They will report sachin is watching movie with his family…But they hardly highlight issues for which the MEDIA term came into existence. If we so called “learned people” of this society disregard such concerns then how can we blame people who are not only living their own life in the darkness but also making thousands of kids to undergo the same….We just cannot expect them to be aware of these things when we have closed our eyes ………..even after seeing it, feeling it…..and lastly knowing about it that It pains a lot if we just imagine our own son or daughter or brother/sister in the same place……
