Govt .

must take stringent measures to stop child labour Child labour in India is a human right issue for the whole world. It is a serious and extensive problem, with many children under the age of fourteen working in carpet making factories, glass blowing units and making fireworks with bare little hands. According to the statistics given by Indian government there are 20 million child labourers in the country, while other agencies claim that it is 50 million. In Northern India the exploitation of little children for labour is an accepted practice and perceived by the local population as a necessity to alleviate poverty. Carpet weaving industries pay very low wages to child labourers and make them work for long hours in unhygienic conditions. Children working in such units are mainly migrant workers from Northern India, who are shunted here by their families to earn some money and send it to them. Their families dependence on their income, forces them to endure the onerous work conditions in the carpet factories The situation of child laborers in India is desperate. Children work for eight hours at a stretch with only a small break for meals. The meals are also frugal and the children are ill nourished. Most of the migrant children who cannot go home, sleep at their work place, which is very bad for their health and development. Seventy five percent of Indian population still resides in rural areas and are very poor. Children in rural families who are ailing with poverty perceive their children as an income generating resource to supplement the family income. Parents sacrifice their childrens education to the growing needs of their younger siblings in such families and view them as wage earners for the entire clan. The existing law and codes of conduct regarding child labour are blatantly violated by the beneficiaries and the victims of this terrible practice all over the developing world. There are ambiguities in the export and manufacturing sector, which means multiple layers of outsourcing and production- making the monitoring of labour performers not only difficult but impossible. Extensive subcontracting also makes it impossible to identify the use of child labour whether intentional or unintentional. Even when laws or codes of conduct exist, they are often violated. The Indian constitution categorically states that child labour is a wrong practice, and standards should be set by law to eliminate it. The child labour act of 1986 implemented by the government of India makes child labour illegal in many regions and sets the minimum age of employment at fourteen years There are many loop holes in this law in terms of affectivity. First is that it does not make child labour completely illegal and does not meet the guidelines set by ILO concerning the minimum age for employment, which is fifteen years. Moreover the policies which are set to reduce incidences of child labour are difficult to implement and enforce. The government and other agencies responsible for the enforcement of these laws are not doing their job. Without proper enforcement all policies and laws concerning child labour prove useless. Govt. of India should take the following steps immediately to stop child labour: 1. It should launch an awareness campaign amongst poorest of the poor as well as other people that producing more children does not mean necessarily more working hands but it also means more mouths to feed. In fact, it should take stringent measures for population
A rights-based approach which relies on laws and their enforcement is therefore insufficient in isolation from broader human development considerations. For example, authorities in India occasionally engineer police raids on suspect factories creating headlines that children have been "rescued". But

Conclusion A rights-based approach which relies on laws and their enforcement is therefore insufficient in isolation from broader human development considerations. For example, authorities in India occasionally engineer police raids on suspect factories creating headlines that children have been "rescued". But such actions will be ineffective in the absence of institutional capacity to rehabilitate the children and assist their families in overcoming the loss of income. Laws need to be complemented with development programmes which recognise the practical difficulties in reintegration of children into formal education. Development agencies are now more likely to acknowledge that children themselves should be consulted. Many children are anxious to find ways of combining education with the economic expediency of helping their families. Formal global development strategies have tended to disregard the child labour agenda. For example, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for school enrolment aims for a total of five years of education, far less than implied by child labour conventions. There is increasing realisation that vital MDGs for poverty, education and health will not be achieved whilst child labour thrives. A cost/benefit analysis carried out by the UN in 2003 convincingly demonstrated the value of eliminating child labour by reference to the long term economic benefit of a more skilled and healthy workforce. As further evidence of interdependence, there is correlation between those countries lagging behind the MDG for education and those in which child labour thrives, such as Pakistan and Nepal. The integration of child labour concerns into national development strategies, backed by effective legislation, is therefore the preferred route to a lasting solution.