Born to be free?????????

International apparel major GAP withdrew garments sourced from India from its 3,000 stores following reports of use of child labour by one of the company's vendors in the capital's Shahpur Jat area. The report said that children as young as 10 years old were working for a GAP sub-contractor and complained of working long hours, going unpaid and being subjected to threats and beatings.
This move sparked off a chain of debates on the ethical and legal implications of employing child labour, which is rampant in our country. Fifty per cent of agricultural labour in India are children. The exports of our country which is the biggest producer of of all consumer goods is irreversibly dependent on the children labourers who were 134 million at last count. Behind every brick that is used in construction, every cup of tea in restaurants,
Using children to work in homes in the city is an unbridled practice in our country. These children are usually uprooted from villages, brought to the city by their own families and sold ruthlessly in households or factories for a pittance of a few thousand rupees.
There is a constant conundrum about reconciling the welfare and education of children with guaranteeing them and their families who are dependent on them, basic means of survival.
As long as there is poverty, child labour will continue to haunt our society. It’s easy for people to sit in their ivory towers and pontificate that child labour should be banned. But these are the people who are oblivious to the grim reality in the third world countries where the children will otherwise lapse into begging, drugs and crime, all of which happen in smooth synchronization.
Lets, for a change, not sit on the defensive and preach against child labour without considering the social construct of our society of which, underprivileged section forms the predominant fraction.
Pulling them off work without a comprehensive rehabilitation plan is like hitting at stomachs of children we want to liberate and throwing them into a vicious, unrelenting and endless life of misery and destitution. But formulating an alternative rehabilitation program, given the convoluted ways of the panjandrum in our country, isn’t exactly a cakewalk. Our government passes these child labour laws with grandiloquence which look flawless on paper, but in practice, are just reduced to pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and political hooey. We don’t have adequate machinery to implement them and extricate the kids from the shackles of slavery.
The government should rather regulate the hours of work, monitor the working conditions, ensure that they are paid fairly, make regular health check ups mandatory and prosecute the defaulters summarily. There should be mobile schools for kids after working hours so they don’t lose out on education. And those concerned with carrying out all of these should rise above their petty agendas and perfunctory supervision and ensure that rights of the working children are not being messed with.