Shahbuddin Ahmed pants for breath even after walking short distances. He is 13, and years of working in pesticide-ridden cotton fields have left him with chronic bronchitis.

His sister Shameema, two years younger, suffers even more. She is wracked by a cough that reverberates deep in her chest.

These young laborers are two among hundreds of children who work in India’s cotton fields and suffer respiratory ailments as a result. Their employers provide no masks or other protective wear.

World Child Labor Day was commemorated yesterday, but in India the event is merely symbolic. Politicians pledge to eradicate the scourge, but such promises are little more than empty words, says child rights activist Sangita Khosla.

Sixty million children work in India despite recent legislation, the Right to Education Act, which stipulates that every child between four and 14 years of age should be in school and not in the workforce, according to various child-related NGOs.

Government estimates put the figure at only 20 million.

Bhuwan Ribhru, a lawyer for the NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, says that while a child laborer earns 15 rupees (less than US$1), and adult laborer makes 115 rupees.

“Thus, the employers make millions of rupees in profit annually [from child workers].”

Child labor in India is practiced mostly in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, at roadside stalls and in construction.

According to a National Sample Survey Office, 67 percent of child workers are agriculture laborers – with the highest number working the cotton fields in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh states.

These states produce three-fourths of all the cotton in India, the world’s second-largest producer.

A recent study by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) shows that child cotton workers are forced to work 14-hour shifts and to carry pesticides on their backs.

They also face other forms of exploitation.

“They suffer sexual abuse, the vagaries of weather and snakebites, besides the ill-effects of exposure to pesticides,” says Shanta Sinha, NCPCR chairperson.

Nearly 400,000 children work in the cotton fields, Sinha says, adding that their nimble fingers are useful for the cross pollination required for cultivating cotton plants.

The children are loaded in vehicles and transported clandestinely at night from Rajasthan to Gujarat during the cross pollination season, Sinha says.

She says many of them are bonded laborers and mostly tribals from Rajasthan, whose parents fall into debt and put their children to work.

Sinha says the scope of the problem became apparent when the NCPCR studied migration rates between Rajasthan and Gujarat.

But there are efforts being made to intervene on behalf of the children.

The Village Child Protection Committee, part of a UNICEF project and supported by the IKEA Foundation, mobilizes local communities across districts to curb child labor, Sinha says.

Thomas Chandy, CEO of the NGO Save the Children India, says IKEA, an international furniture company, is among a very few corporations who recognized an obligation to social responsibility.

Under the “Campaign against Child Labor in Agriculture,” an initiative led by Save the Children in partnership with IKEA, some 74,544 acres of land has been freed from child labor in Vidarbha in Maharashtra state, Chandy says.

He adds that 8,791 farmers from Vidarbha have pledged not to employ children on their farms.

But the government does not seem to consider agricultural work as hazardous.

Sinha says NGOs and civil society groups are lobbying aggressively to get the government to include agriculture among forms of labor deemed to be hazardous.

She says the National Advisory Committee is working on an amendment to the Child Labor Act of 1986 to impose a blanket ban on child labor and insist that every child under the age of 14 be enrolled in school.

Related stories

Child labor continues unabated
Southern Indian diocese takes aim at child labor

Related reports