: Half of India’s children are malnourished. Half never get vaccinated against preventable diseases. More than a million spend their childhood years working as virtual slave labour. And our Minister for Women and Child Development is worried about those who are lucky enough to get into showbiz. On the occasion of the World Day Against Child Labour last week, Renuka Chaudhury announced that she was setting up a panel that would examine the way children were treated by the entertainment industry. “Kids perform like animals. This will not be tolerated. There should be a law to check this,” she said.
The minister did not notice that there already is a law banning child labour and despite this Indian children work in conditions of unspeakable horror. If she travels to the glass factories of Ferozabad, she will meet children as small as 10 working at furnaces that boil glass. In nearby Mirzapur and Badhoi, she will find thousands of children weaving carpets. The matchbox factories of Sivakasi are notorious for employing children in hazardous jobs and in every city in India, children slave in sweatshops that are routinely raided. The rescued children are sent home to impoverished parents who have no choice but to send them back into the workforce. For little girls life is even more horrific because of India’s vast market for child prostitutes. Against this shameful backdrop, to worry about children working in Bollywood films or television serials amounts to making fun of a situation that is beyond horror.
Chaudhury likes her fun. Not long ago, she came up with the idea that the best way to improve the abysmal condition of Government midday meal programmes was to substitute real food with biscuits. The biscuit industry was delighted and probably had something to do with this idea, but if the minister visits Akshaya Patra she might learn that when properly run the midday meal provides the only real meal that some children get.
If the Prime Minister or Sonia Gandhi, whose heart aches so much for the aam aadmi, had an iota of real concern they would have ensured that in ministries like education, healthcare and child welfare there would be ministers who understood the importance of their job. Nothing is more important than lifting Indian children out of the misery in which the vast majority currently live. It can be done. These conditions exist not because India does not have the...
