In a bid to eradicate the practice of child labour, the Labour Ministry has proposed a multi-pronged strategy to tackle the menace and converge the schemes run by various ministries. Funded entirely by the Department of Labour of the US, the scheme — Converging against Child Labour-Support for India’s Model — is to be monitored by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and will begin on a pilot basis from September.

The scheme will first be introduced in Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh since these states have been found to be the major source of migrant labour.

Other ministries — Human Resource Development (HRD), Women and Child Development (WCD), Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Rural Development, Panchayati Raj — have been brought on board with the objective of coordinating various schemes to ensure that children forced to perform child labour and their families can benefit from them.

According to ministry officials, under this all-encompassing scheme, educational rehabilitation of these children will be supplemented with economic rehabilitation of their families so that the compulsion to send their children to work is minimised. If a child below 14 years is found to be working, the state government will help his/her parents avail the benefits of NREGA. Not only will the parents be given priority under the scheme, the children will be enrolled in school under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

“The intention of the scheme is to converge our programme with the programmes run by other ministries. The US will grant $7 million for the project,” Siddharth K Dev Verman, Joint Secretary, Labour Ministry, said. A core group involving the above-mentioned ministries has been formed for convergence at the national level. The duration of the project is 42 months, and its replication in other states will depend on its initial success. “We may take the best practices of this scheme and use them in other states,” added Verman.