Mumbai: Every morning in front of the public housing apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city of Mumbai, a swarm of children pours into the street. They are not going to school. Instead of backpacks or books, each child carries a filthy plastic sack.
These children, between 6 and 14 years old, have been sent by their parents to rummage through garbage dumps littered with broken glass and concrete shards in search of recyclable plastic. They earn a few rupees and most wear no gloves or masks. Many cannot afford shoes and make their rounds barefoot, with bleeding feet.
“I hate it,” said an 11- year-old boy who had to go to work. Before India closed its schools in March, the boy was praised by his teachers being a bright student.
In many parts of the developing world, school closures put children on the streets. Families are desperate for money. Children are an easy source of cheap labor. While India and other countries debate the effectiveness of online schooling, hundreds of millions of children in India and other poorer countries lack computers or the internet and have no schooling at all.
United Nations officials estimate that at least 24 million children will drop out and that millions could be sucked into work. The surge in child labor could erode the progress achieved in recent years in school enrolment, literacy, social mobility and children’s health.
“All the gains that have been made, all this work we have been doing, will be rolled back, especially in places like India,” said Cornelius Williams, a high-ranking UNICEF official.
Child labor is just one piece of a looming global disaster. Severe hunger is stalking children from Afghanistan to South Sudan. Forced marriages for girls are rising across Africa and Asia, according to U.N. officials, as is child trafficking.
In India, the government has also shut down early childhood development centers for the poor. In recent decades, India had built a nationwide network of more than one million anganwadi (kindergarten) that provided millions of young children with food, immunizations, clothes and some schooling, and contraceptives for poor women. But most anganwadis now remain closed.
School-age children in India are now performing all kinds of work, from rolling cigarettes and stacking bricks to serving tea outside brothels, according to child activists. Most of it is illegal. Much of it is hazardous.
India already had a serious child labour problem because of high poverty levels, its population of 1.3 billion and its dependence on cheap labour. Shadowy fireworks and cigarette factories, textile, sweatshops and loosely regulated construction sites often employ children. The authorities had been cracking down and enrolling children, especially girls, in school.
A teacher said, “The whole ecosystem around kids is breaking down.”
On a construction site two brothers aged 12 and 10, struggled under heavy loads of gravel. With a grimace, they hoisted a bucket atop their heads. Their skinny legs nearly buckled. They squinched their eyes tight, looking like they are about to cry. Watching them were men three times their age. The boys get headaches and can’t sleep at night. Their body tingles. The older of the brothers seems to have glimpsed his new future.
They fear that even if school reopens, they will have to keep doing this, because of the family’s debt.
Many child experts said that once children drop out and start making money, it is very difficult to get them back in school. India has ordered elementary and middle schools to remain closed indefinitely, affecting more than 200 million children, though some government teachers are making house calls and teaching in small groups. The central government has allowed high school students to visit teachers on campus, but many states have said no to that as well.
Government officials say the coronavirus leaves them little choice. New infections sometimes reach nearly 100,000 per day. Officials say children would have difficulty maintaining social distancing. “They can end up becoming vectors of virus,” said Rajesh Naithani, an adviser to the education ministry.
Child rights activists say it is remarkable how little the school closures are being discussed. Speeches by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and top ministers usually focus on opening up the economy, not the schools.
Many of the parents say that they are under tremendous pressure to put their idle children to work. “We need their wages,” said an underemployed mason and the father of the two boys. “Without them, I wouldn’t be able to cobble together two meals.”
Employers can smell the desperation. India’s economy has contracted more than any other major economy. Wages are plummeting.
A labor contractor said that parents keep arriving on his doorstep with school-age children. One morning in mid-September, a man showed up with his son and daughter, 12 and 8. The labour contractor said the children stood quietly in the doorway and looked at their father “like they were being prepared to be thrown into a fire.” He says that if he does not find jobs for children because it is illegal. But in this case, fearing the family might starve, he guided them to a truck stop that was looking for a tea server. The 12-yearold boy now works there.
In India, children under 14 are not allowed to work unless it is a family enterprise, like a farm, or in a few other rare circumstances, such as child acting. They are barred from dangerous workplaces such as construction sites and cigarette factories. But because of the disruption caused by the pandemic, UNICEF officials said, there are fewer workplace inspections.
Many children now dread getting up in the morning. It is like their childhood has suddenly ended.
On a recent morning, an 11-year-old boy stood in an empty street in Taloja, an industrial hub in Maharashtra, the sun rising over his left shoulder. The vacant look in his dark brown eyes said: What am I doing here?
His father, a lifelong garbage scavenger from one of the lowest castes, towered over him, lean and glassy-eyed, arms covered in blue homemade tattoos.
“You ready?” his father asked. The boy slowly nodded. “Where are your shoes?” The boy looked down at his bare feet. “I don’t have any,” he said.
His father said the work was “not respectable” but he wanted to keep the boy out of trouble and needed the extra hands.
“He sifts well,” his father said as he watched the boy scrounge a plastic bottle out of a refuse pit, flatten it and drop it into his sack. Later that day, the boy extracted a pair of ratty slippers from a garbage pile and wore them. They almost fit.
While the boy was picking through another dump, a group of boys about his age passed by. They wore backpacks and crisply ironed shirts. They were off to see a private tutor. The boy rested his bag of crushed bottles on the pavement and stared for a moment.
“This is the shame,” said the boy’s teacher. “Kids who weren’t scavenging for garbage are doing it now. Schools need to be reopened.”
“The boy is a good student,” his teacher added. “His absorption power is very good. His vocabulary is very good. He has a high I.Q. He says he wants to be a doctor and he could do it, if he has the right facilities.”
After a morning of scavenging, the boy paid a visit to his school in outskirt of Mumbai’s busy center. The school was windblown and deserted. The only person around was the caretaker, a middle-aged woman in a sari smoothly sweeping the courtyard.
From a giant ring of keys, she pulled one out and unlocked the sixth-grade classroom. The boy walked in. His eyes adjusted to the dark. Water was pooled on the floor. A map of India, the paint chipping off, clung to a wall. To another visitor, this school might have seemed shabby. But not to this boy.
“I really miss this place,” he said.
He walked out, sack over his shoulder, too-big slippers scraping the ground, back into the noisy streets.
The virus deprives lakhs of children a day and the solution exist. It’s called “school”. But you won’t hear about it in the media because education or hunger doesn’t bother the rich. Poverty existx not because the government cannot provide decent education and feed the poor, but because the government cannot satisfy the rich. It’s time to evaluate our priorities.