Despite setting to eradicate child labour from the country by 2016, the government has hardly made any progress due to a general lack of willingness, experts has said.
The government formulated the National Child Labour Elimination Policy in July 2011 in a bid to diminish child labour – in all shapes and forms – by next year. But the project has failed, thanks to the authorities concerned and the lack of cooperation among them.
“We know that the government has put a policy in place. But we cannot see any visible change; there is still a huge number of children out there working hazardous jobs around the country,” said Khandakar Rebeka Sultana of the Coalition of the Urban Poor, a network of NGOs.
Unicef and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics jointly conducted a study on the status of child labour in the country. The results of the study, which were disclosed on July 29, revealed that there are at least five million children between the ages of 5 and 17 years who are actively involved in child labour. Among them, at least two million do hazardous work.
They can be found working as automobile mechanics, cleaners, garbage collectors, transport helpers, domestic help and so on.
No monitoring, no intervention
This correspondent recently visited the capital’s Dholaikhal area to change his motorcycle’s tyre, where a 13-year-old boy named Ashiq offered the service all by himself.
Asked to get an adult to do it as the motorcycle would be too heavy, the boy, named Ashiq, smiled and said: “Why? I can do it alone.”
And he proved it by heaving the motorcycle to his workshop all by himself and change the tyre.
Asked why he did such a job that was clearly too dangerous for him, he solemnly replied: “What choice do I have? I have a mother and a sister at home to take care of. My father left us years ago. I’m the sole breadwinner of my family.”
The Dhaka Tribune asked Rezaul Hasan, OC at Sutrapur police station in the capital, why police was not intervening in such cases and stopping children from taking up hazardous jobs. “No one has filed a complaint in this regard,” he said, adding that it is supposed to be the Ministry of Labour and Employment’s responsibility.
Asked if the ministry had issued any instruction in this regard, Rezaul said he needed to check the documents before saying anything about it.
“We have not seen any willingness among the relevant government agencies to implement the policy properly,” Shabira Nupur, national advocacy coordinator of World Vision, told the Dhaka Tribune. “Since it was formulated, we have had only two meetings.
The government is also reluctant to provide funds for this project, which is why it may not be able reach anywhere near its goal.”
The government made a list of 38 types of work that are hazardous for children, which include jobs in ship-breaking yards, leather industries, construction and automobile workshops.
“We don’t need a priority list of hazardous work,” said Abdus Shahid Mahmud, director of Bangladesh Shishu Odhikar Forum, a platform working on children’s rights. “All forms of child labour is hazardous, so we have to focus on all of them. We have enough resources to implement the policy; it is just our lack of motivation that is making us fail.”
When contacted in this regard, Labour Secretary Faizur Rahman admitted that they were going to miss the policy implementation deadline.
Asked whether the time of implementation would be extended, he said: “Nothing definitive can be said right now as we are still working on it.”
