With a bronze pot balanced on her head and a painted bamboo pole in her hands, nine-year-old Barsati steps onto a tightrope nearly 2m above a Mumbai street.
Her mid-air performance varies — sometimes barefooted, sometimes in flip flops, sometimes walking inside a wheel or with a plate beneath one foot — but each time, her aunt thumps rapidly on a drum and draws in curious passers-by.
Indians on their way to work or tourists filming the spectacle with their smartphones throw rupees into a bowl on the pavement below.
Photo: AFP
Although most are amazed by her skills, Barsati, who took to the rope from the age of five instead of going to school, is nonplussed.
“Now I am used to it. People give us money,” she said, taking a break between performances in the teeming Fort district of south Mumbai.
Barsati’s uncle, Chotu Nath, who oversees the proceedings and gives his age as “about 20,” said that both his mother and his grandmother were tightrope walkers in their youth.
“It’s a family thing,” he said, adding that the children “never fall” because they learn from such a young age.
Barsati spends just a few weeks each year going to school during India’s rainy season, and the rest of her time is spent earning for her family, her uncle said.
She is one of more than 28 million Indian children estimated by UNICEF to be engaged in some form of labor.
A 2009 Right to Education Act mandates free and compulsory schooling for those aged six to 14, but an outright ban on child labor, proposed by the government in 2012, has yet to be passed by parliament.
The current law prohibits children under 14 from working in hazardous jobs — yet even this is not properly implemented, said Kushal Singh, head of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), a government body.
“The basic thing is ignorance, and the belief that the child is required to earn for the family because families are so poor,” Singh said. “This is keeping them in a vicious circle. The only way out is if a child studies and gets an education.”
While methods to measure poverty are hotly contested, a study by the McKinsey Global Institute released last month found more than half of Indians lacked the means to meet their essential needs, spending less than 1,336 rupees (US$21.50) a month.
Many children are therefore encouraged to work.
UNICEF says more than 8 million young Indians are out of school, and more than 80 million drop out before completing eight years of education.
Barsati’s rare skills allow her to take home between 1,500 and 2,000 rupees a day for her family, her uncle says, but her job on the tightrope leaves little time for schoolwork.
At the end of her day performing, she faces a two-and-a-half hour train ride to her family’s slum home on the outskirts of the financial capital, where her parents work as menial laborers.
Other relatives join Barsati’s commute to the street.
Her little brother Rajababu, bearing a painted mustache, crouches by the tightrope-propping poles while she performs and occasionally picks up the bowl to encourage donations.
Singh said attitudes toward child labor are “very, very slowly changing” in India, but much more needs to be done to alter the mindsets of both families and law enforcement agencies.
“They look on children as the responsibility of the parents. We still don’t internalize a rights-based approach to children,” said Singh, whose commission is launching a “From street to school” awareness campaign this month.
Yet there is sign of change on the streets of Mumbai, the densely packed, so-called “Maximum City” in which more than half of the population is estimated to live in slums.
A survey released late last year by ActionAid India and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences found that 37,059 children were living or working on the city’s streets — down from more than 100,000 estimated by a UNICEF study two decades ago.
Some attribute the change to growing surveillance and a lower tolerance for street activity since militant gunmen launched deadly attacks on south Mumbai in 2008.
However, not all are convinced that street children are disappearing.
“The numbers are not going down, people are brushed inward into ghettos and into the suburbs,” said Zarin Gupta, chairwoman of the Salaam Baalak Trust for Mumbai street children.
She believes the city’s child labor force is continually replenished by migrant families from poorer parts of India, and that children trafficked into forced labor, often for domestic service or sex work, remain a huge concern.
Mumbai-based ActionAid India regional manager Nirja Bhatnagar said the problem of working children could not be solved until strides are taken in improving India’s welfare system, including housing, healthcare and sanitation.
“At this point of time, we don’t have any safety net, so everyone in the family has to fend for themselves,” Bhatnagar said.
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