NGO says half a million Indian children work in cotton fields
24/07/2015
Most of these children have dropped out of school and LIW says claims that most are working to help their own familities are incorrect.
Many government programmes in India define children as people who have yet to reach the age of 14, but a 2006 amendment to the country’s Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act holds that a child is anyone under the age of 18.
In the report, called Cotton’s Forgotten Children, LIW recognises the success of some initiatives set up by multinational seed companies, including Bayer, Monsanto and DuPont, to tackle child labour and says that the numbers of young children working in cotton fields in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have fallen by 42% and 69% respectively since 2010.
However, overall numbers have gone up since 2010, when LIW last examined this issue in depth. In 2015, there are 70,000 more adolescents carrying out this work across India and almost 30,000 more young children.
The report offers 11 recommended actions. These include a suggestion that the whole cotton industry must make sure growers receive a fair price for their cotton so that they have no need to resort to employing children to save on wages.
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