Children may be seen as a stop-gap measure to fill jobs left vacant by migrant labourers who fled cities for their rural homes during the lockdown
The coronavirus pandemic is forcing India’s children out of school and into farms and factories to work, worsening a child-labour problem that was already one of the most dire in the world. Sixteen-year-old Maheshwari Munkalapally and her 15-year-old sister stopped attending lessons when virtually the entire economy was brought to a halt during the world’s biggest lockdown. Munkalapally’s mother and older sister lost their jobs as housemaids in Hyderabad, the capital of the southern Indian state of Telangana. The younger girls, who had been living with their grandmother in a nearby village, were forced to become farmhands along with their mother, in order to survive.
“Working under the sun was difficult as we were never used to it,” Munkalapally said. “But we have to work at least to buy rice and other groceries.” It’s difficult to quantify the number of children affected since the pandemic erupted, but civil society groups are rescuing more of them from forced labour and warn that many others are being compelled to work in cities because of the migrant labour shortage there.
Even before the outbreak, India was struggling to keep children in school. A 2018 study by DHL International GmBH estimated that more than 56 million children were out of school in India — more than double the combined number across Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The cost to India’s economy, in terms of lost productivity, was projected at $6.79 billion, or 0.3% of gross domestic product…
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