The Labor Minister recently affirmed that child labor rates had fallen by 64% over the last decade and that he was putting forward a proposal to eradicate it completely. Unions, NGOs, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi are highly critical of the move because it actually introduces an exception for ‘family work’, which effectively defeats the purpose of the law.
The debate over child labor that today affects at least 5.8 million children aged between 5 and 17 has been going on for many years. However the flames of the debate were fanned when India’s Labor Minister Bandar Dattatreya announced the intention to quickly include amendments to the law restricting child labor yet also introduced an exception for children to work in certain family enterprises. Civil society has vigorously criticized the announcement.
The current legal framework. The child labor
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