Peer-reviewed article

CHILD LABOUR AMONG SCHOOL DROP-OUTS AND ITS SOCIAL IMPACT ON THE WORKING CHILD

Vartika Pandey, Bibhu Nayak · 1 Jun 2019

Abstract

Child Labour is a big problem in India and there are10.1 million working children below the age of 14 in India, the share of U.P. is 2.17 million which is 21% of total working children (Census 2011).This study is an attempt to find the social effect of being Child labour in a population of school drop-outs at the elementary level in Central Uttar Pradesh. The study is based on the primary data collected from 500 school drop-outs and their households through a predesigned well-structured questionnaire. The objective of the study is to establish if there is a relation between high school drop-outs and prevalence of child labour and conduct a comparative study of the social behavior including psychological effects among working children and non-working children in the studied population of school dropouts. Out of 500 school drop-outs, 246 (49 %) worked as child labour. Pearson Correlation method is used to establish the relationship between high school dropout and the prevalence of child labour and a strong positive correlation is found among them. Out of the total surveyed drop-outs who suffered from anti-social impact in form of involvement in alcohol or drug abuse, criminal offense, stealing or suffering from mental or physical discomfort a visibly large number are working children. The findings of the study showed a higher incidence of anti-social involvement among child labour in the sample, suggesting child labour does have an adverse social impact on society and also on the individual