• Friday, March 29, 2024

HEADLINE STORY

NGOs seek more from Indian budget to erase child labour

Students hold placards during a demonstration against child labour in Amritsar in the northern Indian state of Punjab. (Photo by NARINDER NANU/AFP via Getty Images)

By: Shubham Ghosh

ON the eve of the presentation of India’s national budget 2022-23, child rights organisations have sought a higher allocation of funds for eliminating child labour besides more investment in making the social safety net stronger.

Emphasising that children’s safety should be the centrepiece of the budget that finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman unveils on Tuesday (1), the organisations said effective preventive mechanisms need to be accelerated immediately.

Jyoti Mathur, executive director of Kailash Satyarthi Foundation, New Delhi, which works on children’s welfare, said the overall percentage share of budget allocation for children in India’s central budget must be improved and restored at least to the level of 2020-21.

“It is noteworthy to mention here that the percentage share of the Union Budget allocated for the welfare of children has been reduced from 3.16 per cent (2020-21) to 2.46 per cent (2021-22). This is the lowest share of the budget allocated for the welfare of children in the last 11 years,” she said.

“In addition, if we look at the budget allocation for the previous two years, the total budget allocated towards the welfare of children has declined by 11 per cent in 2021-22 over 2020-21 (a decline from Rs 96,042 crore in 2020-21 to Rs 85,713 crore in 2021-22),” she added.

There should also be an increased allocation for elimination of child labour with a comprehensive national action plan, Mathur said.

Other suggestions include enhanced budgetary allocation for rehabilitation of bonded labour, which is a part of the overall budget head of the National Child Labour Project (NCLP).

“Since the budget head of the NCLP also includes grants-in-aid to voluntary agencies and reimbursement of assistance to bonded labour it appears impossible to provide any assistance to the victims of bonded labour as the allocation is grossly inadequate even to maintain the fixed expenditure under the NCLP,” she said.

Mathur also highlighted the requirement for establishing an international centre to address incidences of ‘online child sexual abuse’.

Puja Marwaha, chief executive officer of CRY (Child Rights and You), a non-governmental organisation that works on children’s rights, said children should be placed at the centre of any development discourse – both for themselves and for the inclusive growth of the country – and this should be the centrepiece of the national budget.

Speaking on the multiple impacts of Covid pandemic on children, she said, “Experiences and learnings from prior humanitarian crises have shown that children tend to be disproportionately affected during such critical times and their rights, lives and well-being are at risk of irreparable harm.”

“Owing to disruptions in education and health-care systems, lack of access to nutrition and protection services over the past two years, their vulnerabilities, especially within rural areas and marginalised communities have increased multiple times,” she said.

Covid has affected children in diverse ways – physical, emotional, cognitive, or social repercussions, including transition or migration, familial crises, isolation from friends, discontinuity of learning, environment, quarantine, hospitalisation of self or family members, and entry into adult roles of work or marriage, the CRY official added.

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