describe the evil of child labour practiced rampantly by the industrialists
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act was enacted in 1986 and defines a child as "a person who has not completed their fourteenth year of age."69 It does not prohibit child labor per se, nor does it set a minimum age for the employment of children. Instead, it regulates the hours and conditions of work for child laborers, while prohibiting the employment of children in twenty-five hazardous industries.70 Three of the enumerated hazardous industries rely heavily on bonded labor and were included in the Human Rights Watch investigation. These three industries are the beedi (hand-rolled indigenous cigarettes) industry, carpet-weaving, and cloth printing, dyeing and weaving. The other industries discussed in this report are subject to the regulatory aspects of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act. However, implementation of the regulatory provisions of the act require each state to formulate an act-specific set of rules and regulations; the majority of states have not done so as of 1996, ten years after passage of the act.
For first convictions under the hazardous industries prohibition, the act prescribes imprisonment of three to twelve months or a fine of 10,000 to 20,000 rupees. Second offenses are to be punished with a mandatory six months to two years in prison. There are no standing requirements for the filing of a complaint under the Child Labor Act. Any person, including but not limited to any police officer or government inspector, is authorized to file a complaint before any court of competent jurisdiction.
The act also authorizes central and state governments to appoint inspectors charged with securing compliance with the act. Rather than do this, most states have added responsibility for enforcement of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act on to the already-existing ranks of the labor inspectors. This is an undesirable arrangement for two reasons. First, requiring the labor inspectors to also investigate violations of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act saddles them with an unrealistic work burden. Even before the 1986 Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act was added to their responsibilities, a 1979 report by a government-appointed Committee on Child Labour found the inspectors overwhelmed by their duties:
The jurisdiction of individual inspectors was too extensive for them to keep a regular watch on activities within their purview. In several States one inspector was required to cover a group of several districts. He was also burdened with very wide ranging other responsibilities pertaining to labour legislation. [As a result of] this situation...there were practically no prosecutions... of any violation of existing laws pertaining to child labour.71
In practice, some labor inspectors enforce the Factories Act while others enforce the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, a not very efficient division of labor.72 Furthermore, a 1995 government-mandated report on child labor found that "many inspectors were unclear about the import of laws."73
In addition to being overextended, factory and labor inspectors in India are notoriously corrupt and susceptible to bribery.74 Against this background, thereis little reason to expect them to vigorously find and root out instances of illegal child labor.