Child labour needs our urgent attention
An incident in Delhi highlights the challenges of implementing anti-child labour laws and the need for the government to do more to tackle child labour.
A 33-year-old pilot and her 36-year-old husband who worked as part of the ground staff for another airline were arrested from Delhi’s Dwarka suburb for allegedly employing a 10-year-old girl as their domestic help and assaulting her, this newspaper reported on Thursday. Not only did the couple – highly educated and employed in senior positions – break the law by hiring a minor and forcing her to do menial jobs but they also tortured her by punching her and burning her with an electric iron, police said. The cruelty prompted the police to arrest them for voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons, wrongful confinement, buying or disposing of any person as a slave, and cruelty to children under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The brutality triggered spontaneous anger in the neighbourhood, with a group of people thrashing the couple before the police arrived. 
The incident highlights the challenges in the implementation of the anti-child labour laws and the inflexible attitudes even among some of the supposedly enlightened sections of society. In this case, for example, it took a 15-year-old relative of the victim to witness her cousin’s plight and inform the police. It turned out that the 10-year-old was being assaulted because her employers – and being just that, of a minor, should be illegal and invite a jail term – were not happy with her cleaning the balcony. The pandemic likely further pushed more children into deeper vulnerability, forcing them to drop out of school and become breadwinners. Clearly, the government needs to do more to tackle the malaise of child labour, and institute social safety nets to avert such incidents.
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