[GOTFIVEONIT]

Survey on child labour in city slums

Friday, 10 August 2007

Hyderabad, August 10: The district administration in association with Centre for Good Governance (CGG) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) has engaged a reputed a market research group to conduct a first ever comprehensive survey to generate reliable baseline data related to child labourers in city slums.

At the pre-survey workshop organised at CGG to take suggestions from the stakeholders, NGOs and other, Government departments here on Thursday, Collector R.V.Chandravadan said that though official estimates put the child labourers at 65,000, there was no reliable data to back the figure.

The figure was arrived at on the basis of drop out rate of children and on estimated children migrating to city every day but so far a scientific study was not taken up to assess the number and profile of child labourers, their families and their employers, he said.

The objective of survey to be completed in 16 weeks was to give estimates of child labour at the slum level, identification of hotspots, assess profile of children engaged in any form of labour, factors that force a child to work, study employer attitudes towards child labour, and to provide effective inputs for rehabilitation of children at work.

The CGG Director General Rajeev Sharma said that besides helping in arriving at a realistic figure, the survey would also help understand where the earlier interventions had failed in child rehabilitation and to plan better strategies. The ILO Project Officer, Prasad, said that the sample survey would help in prioritising slums for intervention where incidence of child labour was high, for a long term planning and to decide on the resources needed for rehabilitation of child labour.

NCLP In-charge Project Director Ravikumar said the data generated by the survey would also be helpful in identifying beneficiaries for other Government programmes for employment generation. The survey would be representative of 1,000 plus slums both notified and non-notified slums and as many as 30,000 households.

A detailed survey would be taken up in 3,000 households with child labourers. All the children in the age group of five to 17 years would be enlisted to assess the age, gender of child labourers. NGO representatives suggested child labourers outside slums like hotels, workshops, sweetmeat shops, should also be included in the study.

--Agencies





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