Adverse impact of industrialization along Kutch coastline: Fisherfolk turned into wage labourers, child labour on rise

Belonging to Mota Kandagra, one of the adversely affected villages as a consequence of industrialization along the coastal region of Kutch district, Gujarat, Minal, 11, and Sonal, 13, remember the joyful lives they led just two years ago. They never knew what hunger was. They went to the local school, played with their friends and were loved and treated well. Their father had a small farm and was a successful farmer.
Today Sonal, Minal and their mother have to work as manual workers on others' fields to ensure that the family has enough to eat, and their two younger brothers go to school so that one day they could deliver the family from the current poverty and misfortune. This is just one of the several instances quoted by a recent Bank Information Centre (BIC)-sponsored study, which has found a sharp rise in child labour in the villages wherever industrialization has taken place.
Quoting villagers, the study says, following industrialization in the region, dependence on fishing as also farming and other occupations for livelihood has gone down, forcing children into labour force. “Earlier they used to catch Rs 100,000 worth of fish and now that has fallen to Rs 40,000”, the study quotes a fisherman from Sangarh as saying.
The 60 per cent decline in the fish catch “has forced families to engage even young boys early in life so that they have more productive members at work. This has contributed to young boys dropping out of school”, the study points out, adding, how this has also affected pastoralists, too. “In the pastoral communities (as in Tunda and Wandh villages), children are increasingly forced to graze cattle.”
“With the depleted grazing lands and decreasing agricultural productivity in the vicinity, the cattle have to be taken farther from the area for grazing, and the extra burden falls on the children”, the study, carried out by a team led by prominent Gujarat-based activist Prasad Chacko, says, adding, what is deplorable is that industries in the region have not made little effort to build new schools in the area either.
An influential NGO headquartered in US, BIC claims to advocate for "the protection of rights, participation, transparency, and public accountability" in the governance and operations of the World Bank Group-funded projects.

Pointing out that many now children drop out after they go to higher primary levels, the study says, children aged 9-12 “have to travel approximately two to three km, and most parents do not want to send their daughters outside the village because “they do not feel safe”. It quotes people from Tunda village that industry owners were requested to provide school buses, but without any success.
The study further says, the industry people claim that they have “provided vocational training to adolescents and youth” in order to “help increase access to employment opportunities for older children”. However, the study found that “most residents from the villages studied reported that no such training programmes have been organised in their villages.”
In fact, the situation is particularly precarious for girls, the study points out. “In all villages, researchers learned that many adolescent girls are being employed as wage labour on sapling plantation sites that belong to the companies and as domestic labour in the apartments of the staff of the company", the study says, claiming instances of "sexual abuse”.

Loss of livelihood has meant “many parents cannot afford to send their children to school, and there is no outside financial support provided to poor families”, the study says, adding, “Though there are no school fees, and the school provides books for the students, parents are expected to pay for uniforms and stationary.”

Comments

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

Search This Blog