Children continue to toil away

Employing children to labourious and hazardous jobs has been perennial to Dhaka. The menace of child labour has thus been integral to the city's urban life. Forty to fifty years ago, male children were used in a limited number of adult jobs. These works meant cleaning machinery, giving a helping hand to adult workers in arduous menial tasks or carrying the heavy school bags of rich people's children. The latter job was open to female children as well. In those days, openings for attending school by underprivileged children were few. Most of them reached the doorstep of puberty as they remained engaged in one or another back-breaking work. Girl-children were frequently found working as domestic helps at many residences.
In Dhaka, a widely noticeable area employing child labour once was pushing cycle-rickshaws up the two slopes of Lohar Pool (bridge made of iron) in old town. Whenever a rickshaw reached the foot of the bridge, male children in droves swarmed on the vehicle and began pushing it. They bothered little whether they would be paid fairly for the labour they had put in. In most of the cases, the rickshaw-puller or the passenger would throw a few small coins to the children. 
Compared to the inhuman way children are employed to arduous jobs nowadays, the bygone days of child labour seem idyllic. Over the last four to five decades, the nature of child labour has changed drastically in the country's urban centres, especially in Dhaka. In independent Bangladesh, the fledgling industrial sector underwent a great transformation. Comprising small, medium and heavy industries, the whole industrial sector began playing a significant role in the country's economy. The sector now has an informal counterpart, where, apart from a large number of adult labour, child workers are also normally found. It is the child labourers who play a big role in this informal industrial sector, constituting mainly dingy factories and workshops. The reasons the owners prefer child workers include low payment for longer hours, their innate dexterity and adaptability to adverse conditions. These children are either school dropouts or have not attended school. Their parents send them to different kinds of factories to supplement the meagre family income. As a general rule, the parents and the children are least aware of the great health hazards associated with work at many of these factories. Even if a section of the factory owners happen to know about the debilitating health impact of work at these factories, they suppress it.
 A most alarming aspect of work at these factories is a lot of them manufacture products with toxic ingredients. The products include different types of adhesives, insecticides, cheap soaps, etc. Children found at work in making batteries, electrical gadgets, plastic and rubber products are a common sight. Many later suffer from lung and other diseases. These factories are constantly monitored by the child rights organisations. Their repeated appeal to the authorities concerned to enforce stringent rules for the safety of child workers falls on deaf years. Apart from the Child Act 2013, Bangladesh is signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These preventive steps appear to have made little headway in changing the state of the children, vis-à-vis child labour.
Except the strict ban on recruitment of child labour in the ready-made garment (RMG) sector, child workers are found toiling away in many informal industrial sectors. They remain non-existent in the eyes of law. Of late the increase in recruiting children to jobs of transport helpers, as brick kiln labourers and assistants to mechanics has provoked considerable uproars. The ordeals of on-the-job child workers have added to the gravity of the situation. These children, now at their school age, deserve a much better treatment.
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