child labour
All India Total Workforce
Male
Female
Total
5‐9 yrs
997384
843136
1840520
10‐14 yrs
5781697
5004288
10785985
15‐19 yrs
20919212
11377995
32297207
Total India
27698293
17225419
44923712
% to total workforce
10.08%
13.55%
11.18%
Total workforce (all ages)
274783249
127083239
401866488
the children upto 14yrs in the workforce is 12626505 = 12.62 millions = child labour in 2001 (graph)
11% of the workforce of india is child labour. One in every 10 workers in India is a child! If you allocate a tenth of India’s GDP to this share you can see India’s Child Labour has a stake in India’s GDP
POINTS TO PONDER:
1) In practice, however, the poverty argument does not hold water. Precisely the opposite is true: child labor maintains poverty. Because children are easy to exploit and are cheap laborers, they are hired in preference to adults. Child labor thus leads to lower wages and higher unemployment among adults. Children who work and do not go to school will end up in low paid jobs later, and so will their children – and so the vicious cycle of poverty is perpetuated.
2) A theoretical model building on the seminal work of Basu and Van (1998) and Basu (2005), where families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans, leading poor families to utilize more child labor. The increase in child labor comes at the expense of reduced school enrollment. They also examined the effects of the ban at the household level. Using linked consumption and expenditure data, they found out that along various margins of household expenditure, consumption, calorie intake and asset holdings, households are worse off after the ban.
Male
Female
Total
5‐9 yrs
997384
843136
1840520
10‐14 yrs
5781697
5004288
10785985
15‐19 yrs
20919212
11377995
32297207
Total India
27698293
17225419
44923712
% to total workforce
10.08%
13.55%
11.18%
Total workforce (all ages)
274783249
127083239
401866488
the children upto 14yrs in the workforce is 12626505 = 12.62 millions = child labour in 2001 (graph)
11% of the workforce of india is child labour. One in every 10 workers in India is a child! If you allocate a tenth of India’s GDP to this share you can see India’s Child Labour has a stake in India’s GDP
POINTS TO PONDER:
1) In practice, however, the poverty argument does not hold water. Precisely the opposite is true: child labor maintains poverty. Because children are easy to exploit and are cheap laborers, they are hired in preference to adults. Child labor thus leads to lower wages and higher unemployment among adults. Children who work and do not go to school will end up in low paid jobs later, and so will their children – and so the vicious cycle of poverty is perpetuated.
2) A theoretical model building on the seminal work of Basu and Van (1998) and Basu (2005), where families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans, leading poor families to utilize more child labor. The increase in child labor comes at the expense of reduced school enrollment. They also examined the effects of the ban at the household level. Using linked consumption and expenditure data, they found out that along various margins of household expenditure, consumption, calorie intake and asset holdings, households are worse off after the ban.