Converging Against Child Labour: Support for India’s Model

Project Summary Over the past two decades, the Government of India (GOI) has been progressively putting in place a substantial ‘enabling environment’ for the elimination of child labour, including important policy and legislative arrangements. Through the National Child Labour Project (NCLP), administered by the Ministry of Labour and Employment (MOLE) and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) schooling project administered by the Ministry of Education (MOE), it has also demonstrated effective approaches for direct action on the ground which, since 2006, has led to 13,421,333 children being removed from hazardous labour and placed in school. The MOLE has requested the Government of India to expand the NCLP country-wide and to increase the impact. The strategy for achieving this is the concept of “convergence”. Convergence brings, the resources of the country’s major educational and poverty alleviation programmes to bear on the problem of child labour. The rationale, as promoted by the ILO worldwide,is that educational rehabilitation of child workers must be accompanied by economic rehabilitation of their families. It becomes, in effect, a concerted effort of several ministries and levels of government to benefit the child worker and her/his family in the best possible and most durable way. This multi-pronged, integrated approach – referred to as the “Convergence Model” in this document -- constitutes the programmatic framework for the proposed project. This project is the beneficiary of almost fifteen years of joint effort in combating child labour. India and the ILO first began to work together on child labour in 1992 and, currently have three projects underway: INDUS (funded by the Government of India and the U.S. Department of Labor); the Andhra Pradesh state-based project (funded by the U.K. Department for International Development), and the Karnataka state-based project (funded by the Government of Italy). The experience from these efforts – both national and state-based – constitutes an unparalleled source of knowledge about the nature and dynamics of the child labour problem and effective measures for combating it. Some of the lessons learned that have been particularly influential in the design of the new Convergence project are: • The importance of establishing a practical, functioning partnership among the government agencies concerned with education, poverty alleviation and labour such that when child labourers are identified and withdrawn from work there is immediately available the professional support of education and training departments for the children’s rehabilitation, and of economic development programmes to offset the financial loss to their families. • The necessity of programme measures being realistic in light of local conditions, and at the same time having a strong likelihood of being mainstreamed and then replicated so that the model is easily transferable to other districts, and once refined at the district level, can then serve as the basis for the GOI to take it to scale nationwide • Taking advantage of the natural complementarities among the major national programmes: the NCLP, the SSA, and poverty alleviation programmes. The project can then design its technical support so as to focus in on the gaps or lacunae rather than duplicate existing work • The necessity of having a robust method of monitoring the occurrence of child labour, coupled with referral to appropriate services and enforcement/prosecution measures as necessary • The importance of addressing the hazardous working conditions of adolescents and documenting, through solid occupational safety and health (OSH) research, the health effects of specific industries upon their physical and emotional development. It was evident, during implementation of the INDUS project, that the context or environment has a strong influence on elimination of child labour efforts—either enabling or stunting them. Three observations deserve s

Project symbol

IND/08/50/USA

Admin unit

DWT/CO-New Delhi

Start date

30/09/2008

End date

30/06/2013

Total allocation

6850000

Total expenditure

Status

Closed

5252296

Development Partners

USA, United States Department of Labor, Bureau for International Labor Affairs, Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking

Country/Countries

India

Outcomes

Employment Promotion
Child Labour