The cream-and-orange cafe with scalloped windows on India’s National Highway 31 dubs itself the “Compleat Family Hotel.”
But the only children inside were small boys hard at work clearing away the plates.
“I ran away from school because the teacher used to beat me,” said spindly-legged Mukesh Kumar, 12, speaking softly as he wiped down a table, gesturing to a welt on his foot.
Kumar said he had been working full-time for three months, even though he is two years below the minimum age for employees in homes, hotels and restaurants, as set by a key 2006 amendment to India’s child labor laws.
He lives in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, but millions of children across the country also endure the hard grind of working life, often laboring as many as twelve hours a day for paltry wages.
India, since passing a 1986 law that banned those under 14 from working in hazardous industries such as fireworks manufacture, has slowly strengthened legislation against child labor.
The 2006 amendment — passed two years ago this month — criminalized many hidden aspects of the problem and was hailed as a major breakthrough.
But activists say the new laws have made little progress in ending a practice rooted in India’s dire poverty.
“It is all about international image building,” said Kailash Satyarthi, a prominent advocate against child labor, who accuses the government of lacking the political will to enforce the law. “When there is pressure from other countries, you can just show them that you have this good law.”
Indian officials say approximately half a million children have been removed from work and sent back to their villages or special boarding schools over the last decade.
But the government cannot say whether the number of children rescued outpaces the number of new children sent to work. In fact, no one can agree on how many children are employed illegally.
The last census in 2001 put the number of child workers at 12.6 million, while a major household health survey released two years ago and cited by the UN estimated it was closer to 30 million.
But Satyarthi puts the real number today as high as 60 million.
Child welfare advocates also fear that many of those saved from child labor soon return to work.
“Reintegration of these children back into mainstream society remains a challenge,” said Simrit Kaur, a UNICEF child protection specialist. “Children are removed from exploitative situations but, not having a clear rehabilitation mechanism, at times children fall back to probably worse situations.”
Government labor officials say they are working to improve the information that they use to plan how to tackle child labor.
“We want to know the actual numbers so we can target those children in a more effective manner,” said Shree Ram Joshi, an Indian labor official who expects a clearer picture to emerge from a major new survey next year.
Government authorities and activists do at least agree that the best way to fight child labor is to improve education and family earnings — though few quick fixes exist.
In the meantime children often say they must work because they learn nothing at school or are ill-treated there or at home.
“My parents were not all right. My mother used to beat me,” said Abhishek, a small round-faced boy who looked about 10 working as a delivery boy at a food stall in the heart of New Delhi.
He left his home in bordering Uttar Pradesh state three months ago and now sleeps at the stall where he found work for 800 rupees (US$20) a month.
“This is the right thing for me now,” he said, insisting he was 14.
Years later, however, many child workers like Abhishek resent their childhoods spent at work.
Chitranjan Kumar Varma, 28, ran away from his teacher’s beatings and from his parents, who wanted him to stay at school, to learn how to drive.
Fifteen years later he earns the equivalent of about US$150 a month.
“Now I feel bad I didn’t study. Now I understand what studying can bring you,” said Varma. “I would have gone ahead in life. Now I can’t do anything but be a driver.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not