Peer-reviewed article

Will Substantial Gain on Reducing Child Labour Fail Due to Covid-19? School Closure, Economic Crisis and Child Labour during pandemic

Prabhat Kumar · 31 Aug 2020

Abstract

Child labour is most prevalent among children from excluded social groups such as poor families, subsistence farmers, and landless households. These children work in different sectors such as agriculture, industry and the service industry. The COVID-19 Pandemic has aggravated the problem. Post the imposition of the lockdown in the country, huge population if migrants have returned to their home states, fuelling the risk of children being forced into labour or trafficking to make up for the lost income. A report released by the World Bank titled ‘COVID-19 Crisis through a Migration Lens’ recognized the impact of the virus on the livelihoods of a large proportion of the country’s internal migrants. Migrant labour is a key driver of the urban economy; however, lock-down has forced many to return to their villages due to the absence of employment and a steady flow of income. Moreover, with a significant number of households’ migrating with their families, children have been forced to discontinue schooling, engage in labour or home-based work upon return to their native villages. According to ILO Global Estimates in the last two decades, progress has been made to ensure that 9 out of 10 of the world’s children are not in child labour, slavery or trafficking; however, ending the exploitation of the 1 child in 10 has proven to be a challenge, with the decline in child labour between 2012-2016 at a third of the rate of the decline in the 2008-2012 period. Unicef and ILO foresees that millions of children are at the risk of being pushed into child labour as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, which could lead to the first rise in child labour after 20 years of progress. With the vast impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the vulnerability is exacerbated for children to be forced into labour as schools are closed or inaccessible, there is economic downturn in household income, limited functioning of social services and greater demand for cheap labourers. Thus, it is unlikely that we will be in a position to achieve our target of elimination of all forms of child labour by 2025. Better efforts need to be made to prevent children from getting forced into labour. In India over half of the child labourers are located in the five states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh – the same states that account for the majority of out-of-school children (with the exception of Maharashtra). The irony is that all these states have been very badly affected by COVID-19.