Give back their innocence !!

Child labor …how do we define it? Isn’t it something that we see everyday and turn our backs on? Remember the child selling the latest issue of Cosmo on the street? Or the one from whom we bought that nariyal pani from, when the heat was getting to us? How elated we were! Ah! Helped a child today! Helped? Yes that’s what we thought. That’s what most of us think when we buy these little things from the children selling them. But while we were quenching our thirst and gloating in our newfound role of a ‘savior’, did we notice the thirst on that child’s lips?

What most of us fail to see is the sweat on their foreheads. The beads of perspiration on their little brows. The worried looks on their faces. Yes. What we fail to see is their helplessness. We see their poverty; we see their ‘hard work’. What we don’t see is their freedom. What we don’t see is a child’s innocent smile. Face it …we don’t see a child at all!

What we see is a little person trying to earn a livelihood. Trying to feed his family. Trying to make ends meet. And most of us appreciate this. Why not? That child isn’t begging. Is he? He’s working. Making an honest living. Well, its time we gave it another thought!

Another thought to the fact that the child will never know what school is; what books are; what his name would look like in print. While our kids throw tantrums for the new GI Joe, he’ll never know what a teddy is.

We have to wake up to the fact that poverty, illiteracy, our social structure, lack of efficient social reforms, have together, raped his childhood.

We need to give his childhood, with all its innocence, back to him. We owe this to him. This is his right.

We have to bring about awareness for ending this charade of child labor in the garb of child welfare. It is time that certain questions, regarding our policies on child labor, need to be asked out loud.