Child labour has been in India from a long time in some form or the other.

search for
definition of child labour . The reasons which are generally responsible for child
labour may include :

Poverty,Ignorance,Illiteracy,Population explosion,Lack of knowledge of their own

rights,Big amounts of debt on the parents,Large size of family but not enough
income to support such big family,Lack of social security scheme in the
country,Weak enforcement of labour laws.

According to an U.N.O report India has the maximum child labour in the world i.e.
approx 20 per cent.

On the basis of Census 1991 and various governmental and non-governmental

organizations following are the number of child labourers in India :

Census 1991 – 2.63 crore,

Organization research group, Baroda, 1994-95 – 4.44 crore,

Centre for concern of Child Labour – 10 crore.

Extra-governmental volunteer organization – more than 5 crore.

The numbers may vary according to different organizations but the fact is clear that
the numbers of child labourers in India are in crores, which is again a pathetic sight,
especially with all the various child labour legislation and the Constitutional
provisions. In a report by the Labour Ministry every 4th child is a child labour, aged
between 5-14 years and there is one child labour in every three families.

economic effect of child labour:

There is a clear need to understand the working of developing countries before

studying the econmic effects of child labour. every developed country during their
initial stages was not short of child labour, the cotton mills of the erstwhile industrial
britain prove to be great examples. preventing child labour in itself has been a new
concept surfacing only in the past century. To substantiate that arguement, we can
look at the "Developed" USA , which legislated against child labour only in 1938
through the 1st labor standard act, interestingly the PCI was 10,000 USD, meaning
they were already having a decent standard of living, thanks to years of exploitation
of children and minorities. To neglect all other capitalistic improvements and
advocate that they are developed only because of exploitative child labour is farce
but not entirely untrue.

the third world countries, now also have a moral burden building upon their already
existing financial burden to be social justice warriors at the same time combating
developed economies in the free market world.
when trying to study the economics of child labour, classification of the economics
into macro and micro proves to be efficient

Micro family level findings:

 however in the short-run, child labour increases households’ income and probability
of survival
 in the long run, child labour perpetuates household poverty through lower human
capital
 child labour and schooling are not necessarily mutually exclusive
 schooling may not lead to the accumulation of human capital
 child labour in most wage-employment non-agriculture activities does not lead to
skills development
 in the long run child labour perpetuates poverty through enhanced fertility
Macroeconomic level findings:
 child labour can slow down long run growth and social development through
reduced human capital accumulation
 child labour occurs mostly in the unorganised sector and in small units with simple
technology and little capital equipment. Whether reducing child labour would speed
up capital investment and technological change depends on the impact on adult
wages. Child labour can be expected to have an ambiguous impact on income
inequality in the short run, and to increase income inequality in the long run
 child labour might affect more girls than boys, fuelling gender inequality in education
 child labour does not attract foreign direct investment
 whether children actually do substitute adult workers creating adult unemployment
and/or reducing adult wage rates remains an open question
 to the extent that children compete with unskilled adults for the same jobs, child
workers affect adult employment or adult wages depending on the structure of the
labour market

Vicious cycle of child labour

solutions:
awareness, stronger implementation of legislation
the legislation will need another full essay so ....:P

Economic growth is generally defined as improvements in average per capita

income. Child labor is overwhelmingly concentrated in the poorest of
households. Hence, growth can impact child labor through changes in living
standards when growth benefits the poor. While there is
considerable nuance in the literature, it seems reasonable to assume that
growth in average per capita income will typically raise the living standards of
the poor (Dollar and Kraay 2002). This section argues that improvements in
the standard of living of the poor influence child labor by changing how
households cope with economic shocks, how households organize their
production and consumption, and how households make decisions regarding
child time allocation.
Definition
The term child labour, suggests ILO, is best defined as work that deprives children of
their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental
development. It refers to work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous
and harmful to children, or work whose schedule interferes with their ability to attend
regular school, or work that affects in any manner their ability to focus during school or
experience healthy childhood.

UNICEF defines child labour differently. A child, suggests UNICEF, is involved in child
labour activities if between 5 to 11 years of age, he or she did at least one hour of
economic activity or at least 28 hours of domestic work in a week, and in case of children
between 12 to 14 years of age, he or she did at least 14 hours of economic activity or at
least 42 hours of economic activity and domestic work per week.

ndia's Census 2001 office defines child labor as participation of a child less than 17 years
of age in any economically productive activity with or without compensation, wages or
profit. Such participation could be physical or mental or both. This work includes part-time
help or unpaid work on the farm, family enterprise or in any other economic activity such
as cultivation and milk production for sale or domestic consumption. Indian government
classifies child laborers into two groups: Main workers are those who work 6 months or
more per year. And marginal child workers are those who work at any time during the
year but less than 6 months in a year.

Some child rights activists argue that child labour must include every child who is not in
school because he or she is a hidden child worker. UNICEF, however, points out that
India faces major shortages of schools, classrooms and teachers particularly in rural
areas where 90 percent of child labour problem is observed. About 1 in 5 primary schools
have just one teacher to teach students across all grades.

Consequences of child labour

The presence of a large number of child labourers is regarded as a serious issue in terms
of economic welfare. Children who work fail to get necessary education. They do not get
the opportunity to develop physically, intellectually, emotionally and psychologically.
Children in hazardous working conditions are in worse condition. Children who work,
instead of going to school, remain illiterate which limits their ability to contribute to their
own well being as well as to community they live in. Child labour has long term adverse
effects for India.

To keep an economy prospering, a vital criteria is to have an educated workforce

equipped with relevant skills for the needs of the industries. The young labourers today,
will be part of India’s human capital tomorrow. Child labour undoubtedly results in a
trade-off with human capital accumulation.

Child labour in India are employed with the majority (70%) in agriculture some in low-
skilled labour-intensive sectors such as sari weaving or as domestic helpers, which
require neither formal education nor training, but some in heavy industry such as coal
mining.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), there are tremendous
economic benefits for developing nations by sending children to school instead of work.
Without education, children do not gain the necessary skills such as English literacy and
technical aptitude that will increase their productivity to enable them to secure higher-
skilled jobs in future with higher wages that will lift them out of poverty.

Child Labour Law in India

After its independence from colonial rule, India has passed a number of constitutional
protections and laws on child labour. The Constitution of India in the Fundamental Rights
and the Directive of State Policy prohibits child labour below the age of 14 years in any
factory or mine or castle or engaged in any other hazardous employment (Article 24).
The constitution also envisioned that India shall, by 1960, provide infrastructure and
resources for free and compulsory education to all children of the age six to 14 years.
(Article 21-A and Article 45). India has a federal form of government, and child labour is a
matter on which both the central government and country governments can legislate, and
have. The major national legislative developments include the following:

The Factories Act of 1948: The Act prohibits the employment of children below the age
of 14 years in any factory. The law also placed rules on who, when and how long can
pre- adults aged 15–18 years be employed in any factory.

The Mines Act of 1952: The Act prohibits the employment of children below 18 years of
age in a mine.

The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986: The Act prohibits the
employment of children below the age of 14 years in hazardous occupations identified in
a list by the law. The list was expanded in 2006, and again in 2008.

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) of Children Act of 2000: This law made it
a crime, punishable with a prison term, for anyone to procure or employ a child in any
hazardous employment or in bondage.

Ø Conclusion
At the end it can be concluded that, Child Labour is the practice of having children
engage in economic activity, on part or full-time basis. The practice deprives children of
their childhood, and is harmful to their physical and mental development. Poverty, lack of
good schools and growth of informal economy are considered as the important causes of
child labour in India.

The problem of child labour continues to pose a challenge before the nation. Government
has been taking various pro-active measures to tackle this problem. However,
considering the magnitude and extent of the problem and that it is essentially a socio-
economic problem inextricably linked to poverty and illiteracy, it requires concerted efforts
from all sections of the society to make a dent in the problem.
The impact of child employment on local labor markets is less nuanced than its
impact on child development. When there are more workers willing to work at a
given wage than there are jobs, workers will compete and drive down wages.
Hence, the more child workers in the economy,
the lower the wages of jobs those children compete for (unskilled work). This
creates a cycle of poverty: child labor leads to low wages leads to the need for
child labor. It is certainly no coincidence that child labor laws in the U.S. became
widespread and enforced during the 1930s, when adult unskilled employment
was at a historic high. Child labor may have long-term
consequences for growth through its impact on child development, but the more
prevalent child employment today, the lower unskilled wages today. Low
unskilled wages today also have longterm consequences for economic growth, as
an abundance of unskilled labor discourages the adoption of skill intensive
technologies. Countries adopt the technology that is complimentary to
factors they are abundant in. Hence, the more child labor, the more unskilled
labor, the less likely countries are to adopt technologies that take advantage of
skilled labor. This further discourages the accumulation of human capital,
leaving countries worse off over the long term.
Child labor impacts growth, but it is also an artifact of a lack of growth,
especially among the very poor. Most working children are involved in
agriculture, usually in their own family’s farm. However, the fact that children
are mostly involved in family based agriculture does not imply that family based
agriculture causes them to work. These agricultural, unspecialized
households are poorer, and there is little to suggest a relationship between
industrial composition and child labor beyond the correlation between industrial
composition and poverty. The introduction of new productive assets into the
family at early stages of growth may lead to more child employment, but as
family incomes increase, child employment appears to decline rapidly.
There are several channels through which economic growth reduces child
employment. Children are an important part of how poor households triage
economic shocks. With growth, shocks become less meaningful in the lives of the
global poor and the poor develop more capacity to cope with shocks without
expansion of child labor. Children are important workers in household based
production. With growth, households specialize, moving production away from
the home and into activities where children are at a disadvantage. Of course,
families also care about their children, and growth may overcome constraints
that limit a family’s ability to facilitate play, healthy development, and education.
Families may also simply desire to have more of these luxuries that
are alternatives to child labor when they grow richer.

2. The Impact of Child Labor on Economic Growth

The UN Sustainable Development Goals lists the elimination of child labor as a
practical and measurable target for sustainable development (under Goal 8).
Child labor has the potential to undermine economic growth through its impact
on child development, wages, and technology adoption.
2.1 Impact on child development - Education
There are a fixed number of hours in a day. As such, the time children spend
working necessarily trades off with other uses of time: such as playing, studying,
or schooling. Ensuring sufficient playtime for children was at the forefront of
concerns about child labor in early 20th century U.S.
(Fuller 1922, Pangburn 1929), but education is more central in modern
discussions of the cost of child employment. Lorenzo Guarcello and co-authors
(2006) provide a nice discussion of the importance of child labor in the context
of UNESCO’s Education for All movement. Employed children are less likely to
attend school compared to children who are not economically active, but most
working children also attend school. In fact, for some children, work
allows them to afford school costs or helps their families pay for schooling
(Manacorda 2006).
While working to attend school can be relevant in some circumstances, in
Edmonds (2008), I document that working children are less likely to attend
school in each of the 34 low-income economies I examine. Some work is more
difficult to combine with school than others. Deborah DeGraff and co-authors
(2015) document that children in hazardous occupations in Brazil are
especially unlikely to combine work with schooling. This may owe to differences
in hours worked, side effects of the work, or it may reflect selection in who
participates in hazardous activities.
There is also a strong negative association between school test scores and child
employment, even for the most common forms of work. Beyond its impact on
attendance, work reduces the child’s time available for study and the child’s
capacity to devote attention to school or homework. Some of the most
compelling evidence on this comes from Brazil, where Patrick Emerson and co-
authors (2016) follow the same children over time, observing the child’s
performance in school and labor status. Consider two children with equivalent
educational backgrounds; both are in the same year and have identical
performance measures. The child who starts working while still attending school
does not test as well; the working child’s lower test scores are equivalent to one
quarter to three fifths of a year less knowledge accumulation than the child who
did not start working. Thus, the more prevalent child labor in a country, the less
educated its future workers will be.

. The Impact of Economic Growth on Child Labor

To understand how economic growth impacts child labor, it is useful to have
simple analytical framework in mind. Poor families balance the child's potential
economic contribution in each possible activity against alternative uses of child
time. Different activities vary in their potential economic contribution. Families
also may have feelings about these activities. Children work when their family’s
valuation of the child’s economic contribution is at least as large as the family’s
valuation of other uses of child time.

3.1 Industrial Composition of Employment, Technological Change, and Child

Labor
Economic growth is associated with changes in the industrial composition of
employment. Richard
Baldwin and Philippe Martin (2001) emphasize the importance of
industrialization in fostering growth, and Bruce Johnston and John Mellow
(1961) emphasize that the process of economic
growth tends to be associated with a decline in the agricultural labor force as
well as the share of
national income in agriculture. Changes in the industry mix impact growth, and
growth impacts
the industrial composition of employment.