Sohail, a six year old boy who works to support his family in Jaipur
It’s eight in the morning, while children get ready to school – six-year-old Sohail get ready to toil at a gem polishing workshop, in one of Jaipur’s slums, some where in north India.
By the time children of his age are back from school at midday, Sohail is not even halfway through his rigorous daily routine. He works ten hours from eight to eight.
Little Sohail is a gem of a person, a fragile three feet and a half that shy away from the crowd. He barely understands what is expected of him at the work place. A World Vision volunteer asked him whether he gets tired, “The work is easy, I don’t get money but I get free food in the day time”, he smiled bending his head down.
It is obvious that little Sohail do not have much idea, how rigorous his work culture is. He showed his tender hands to the women in the community hall – his fingers have cut marks but they are not as bad as the other working children said another World Vision volunteer.
The mercury hits 40 degree Celsius, and inside the small room of six by seven feet sits Sohail in the corner along with six other teenagers much older to him. There is another boy in this boiling hot workspace and he would be around 12 years of age, six years older than Sohail.
Sohail’s job is to carefully place each gem on the pencil-like stone and then softens the gem by applying it, in the fire contained in a tin of red burning charcoal. In one working day Sohail would finish at least two to three hundred pencils.
People in the slum said, his parents are in debt, and poverty therefore forced them to put their children in the gem workshop instead of a school. Sohail gets paid a meager forty rupees (equals to less than a dollar) and this money goes straight to his parents.
Sohail does not know how school life would feel like because he has never been inside the classroom. “My father couldn’t send me to school”, he said. Being the fourth child in the family with five siblings puts Sohail’s family in a difficult situation and some thing that people can criticize easily – if they do not live the harsh realities of disadvantaged families like Sohail’s.
The boy now sits on the floor, and Manisha, a World Vision field staff asked him- “What do you want to become when you grow up?” to which Sohail did not know how to respond. This made people in the room whispered ‘how difficult it is for the child who spends ten hours working to have a dream’.
Some one shouted Sohail’s name from across the road and this mal-nourished six-year-old politely excused himself. Sohail needs to go back to work.
Sohail doesn’t have a dream yet, but his neighbors in Rajiv Nagar slum, Jaipur who belong to the children’s club along with World Vision is thinking about him. “We will help him”, said Tanzim, member of the Children’s club initiated by World Vision.
Shakti Children’s club is exploring possibilities to talk to Sohail’s parents and his employers – to allow him to work for lesser hours and also study at the Early Childhood and Care Education Center. As it is, the club has been helping children who are weak to catch up with their books – so accommodating another child will not be a problem.
World Vision has been working in the area to attempt to rescue children like Sohail. “It is not easy, but we have seen positive results. Children’s working hours have been reduced and that is a good thing”, said Anil, World Vision Programme Manager, Jaipur Area Development Programme.
As in the case of most children here – extreme poverty is pushing the parents to send their children to work or engage them to work for the family to survive. Sending their children to school is viewed more as a gamble because the atmosphere in the slums does not guarantee a child’s sure chance of completing study. And if children do not complete their studies, their early years in school are thought of as a complete waste, because instead of schooling - the same child can be useful in polishing gems.
Like India, the city of Jaipur has two sides: it has prosperous jewellery and tourist industries, yet also sprawling slums and acute poverty. As the capital of the desert state of Rajasthan, Jaipur has been the focal point of massive immigration during a recent series of droughts. These migrants, plus many impoverished others, live with their children in illegal makeshift shacks, tents, or on the street, and are regularly moved on by authorities.
For the children education is an unattainable luxury, or an irrelevance. They lose their childhoods and have little hope for a better future.
The extensive reality of child labor in India is well recognized, despite the existence of provisions in the Indian Constitution and in laws prohibiting child labor. Nonetheless, aside from these good intentions, child labor is thriving, and makes a major contribution to India's Gross Domestic Product.
