- Laws prohibit child labour, but are not implemented
By: Nazish Hassan Wazir
“I want to remain with unrequited suffering.”– Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
The summer sun shines mercilessly on his greased eleven-year-old face as he circles a gold Corolla, washing the dirt off it. The metal acquires a reflecting shine while his features dull beneath the dust. The innocence of his age inhumed, but not quite lost, beneath the facade of instructed maturity. It has been four months since his father coerced him into working at the workshop to help support the family of seven for a meagre daily wage of Rs 50. He pockets the tip stemming from the private isolated generosity of the customer with a meek bow, and grabbing his bucket of murky water and a grubby towel, moves to the next car. Ironically, in the background stands a makeshift shade with a tattered rug emblazoned with the logo of UNICEF, bearing a sarcastic similarity to the boy’s physiognomy– dust-ridden and invisible.
The preceding description is not an excerpt from fiction but a reality, and worse, for many (in Pakistan and across the globe). It just so happens that the literary genius of the 19th century Victorian era, Charles Dickens, is known by fans for his eloquent descriptions of the tragic aesthetics of a downtrodden society. In his esteemed works he has penned down the society in complimenting hues of destitution and desolation with a general theme revolving, more often than not, around underprivileged children. His prose presents a picturesque bitter reality of the sufferings of children in an insufficient society, applicable not only to the Victorian era but unfortunately so, even the 21st century.
Children are the future of a nation and are entitled to a healthy childhood. They have the right to education and social security. Denying them the right to a healthy present is equivalent to denying a nation its future
Pakistan, with its share of socioeconomic and political struggles, is a country faced with myriad challenges. Of the countless many, child labour stands as a monumental problem afflicting Pakistan, with over 12.5 million children caught in the talons of the aforementioned social evil. The exalted narcissism of a nation often renders it blind to its own shortcomings and so happens to be the case with Pakistan where child labour just comes to pass without registering a hint of ignominy. When a social evil passes off as a social norm, that is the death of morality in a society.
It is an established fact that child labour attributes its existence to poverty. Now poverty, as Dostoevsky rightly stated, ‘is not a vice’, but it certainly can be the birth of social vices. An empty belly can starve the conscience to death and as for morality in our part of the world, it surely does come with a price tag. The pernicious conviction to buffer poverty with child labour only serves to superimpose an edifice of social and moral depravity over the existing scaffold of poverty. Now the consequence of poverty in this case is a morally corrupt society that feeds its belly off the calloused hands of a child.
Furthermore, the by-product of abstract arguments of ignorance is a firm belief that the more the earning hands, the brighter the prospects of survival for an impoverished family. A neglected aspect of the above equation is the coefficient of mouths to be fed. This misconception not only favours the odds of survival crisis but also adds to the ecological burden of population crisis.
Note well: Along with poverty, derelict capitalism also promotes the practice of child labour. With opulence often comes a sense of social negligence. The incentive of cheap labour is reason enough for the rich to nurture this social vice. Hence, both the affluent and the needful, mutatis mutandis, can be witnessed to favour child labour– a quid pro quo between the crust of the privileged and the core of the deprived.
When it comes to laws concerning child labour, Pakistan has passed many significant acts pertaining to the issue in question including the Factories Act 1934, the Employment of Children Act 1991 and the Bonded Labour Abolition Act 1992 and many more. Despite the laws in place, children below 14 years of age are still overtly employed in factories and workshops, enslaved in the domestic sector, toiling in brick kilns and bound in indentured servitude, and the numbers are only increasing by the day. The legal quagmire of Pakistan is that laws here often have the status of a written word only, with zero practical significance. They present only a cosmetic fix and are far from the much needed structural repair. Based on that datum alone, child labour, paradoxically, is in its true sense neither permitted nor prohibited in Pakistan. Hence, the solution is not more laws but adequate and thorough implementation of the ones already in place.
Children are the future of a nation and are entitled to a healthy childhood. They have the right to education and social security. Denying them the right to a healthy present is equivalent to denying a nation its future. In the words of Iqbal Masih (The 12-year-old boy who challenged the realm of bonded labour in Pakistan and became a voice that reverberates through the strata of this negligent society):
“Children should have pens in their hands and not tools.”
