Plight of underprivileged children

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Monika Maurya

28 January, 2011

Due to poverty many parents sell their children and many send them voluntarily to earn money thinking that they would get some work there and earn some money for the family. But they are not aware of the reality.

CHILDHOOD IS assumed to be the most enjoyable, pleasurable and the part of life which is filled with fun ‘n’ frolic. Childhood is all about no tension, no worries, no pressure of life but just playing, eating and doing all the naughtiness.

But are all the children born with this privilege? Are all the children provided the opportunity of schooling, play enjoy their childhood? The answer is a big no. No, not all the children are given the opportunity to go to school. Not all the children get chance to play and enjoy their childhood and childishness. The condition is so worst that they even don’t get the basic necessities, roti (Food), kapada (colthes) and makaan (housing) and even not the safe drinking water.

They are found roaming with no clothes on their body, barefoot and begging. Or we can find them working in some tea shop, dhaba, hotel, motel or as domestic help and even in the factories where working conditions are hazardous. They do not grow well and develop physically, mentally and emotionally. Some of these children can also be found as rag pickers. These children are partners in the survival of their family. For these rag pickers, garbage is gold. It is their daily bread, a roof over their heads, even if it is leaking roof. But for a child it is even more as they sometime find a rupee coin in it.

If we take the example of Firozabad, the city of bangles, centre of India’s glass flowing industry where families have spent generations working around furnaces, welding glass, making bangles for all the women in the land it seems, we can definitely understand it is not all the time poverty which is the reason of children not enjoying their childhood.

Before the child is aware, he accepts it as naturally as his father. These families have fallen into the vicious circle of the ‘sahukars’, the middlemen, the policemen, the keepers of law, the bureaucrats and the politicians. To do anything else would mean to dare. Their families are caught in the web of poverty burdened by the stigma of caste in which they are born and that’s of bangles maker. These children work in the glass furnaces with high temperatures, in dingy cells without air and light; often losing the brightness of their eyes.

They live in stinking lanes choked with garbage, homes with crumbling walls, wobbly doors, no windows crowded with families of human and animals coexisting in primeval state.Colorful bangles which they make symbolise auspiciousness and colours of life from which they are barred.

If we are discussing about the children of marginalised sections of society then human trafficking is also a big factor in this context. Human trafficking refers to buying and selling humans mostly women and children for the purpose of slavery and prostitution.

Due to poverty many parents sell their children and many send them voluntarily to earn money thinking that they would get some work there and earn some money for the family. But they are not aware of the reality. Poverty is the main culprit for this as no parent would sell or send their children just for the sake of money. Human trafficking is harmful for children’s psychological as well as physiological development.

Making children work as a labour in any condition is illegal and the parents and the employer can be sent to jail and punished.
In India, every child has the right to be educated. Government has provided free education for children. But not all the children get this opportunity as merely a few seats are left after the admission of children of government employees and of those, who through some source or acquaintance admit their child in the government schools.

And if we see the services provided by government to marginalised, ignored, poor and underprivileged, rarely reach them as these are siphoned off up by officials and middlepersons. Our system has totally become corrupt and that’s the reason why we hear everyday about a new scam.