Containing child labour

Employing children in hazardous work had long been a contentious issue in the country, as elsewhere. After the government initiative taken a couple of years ago to eliminate the worst forms of child labour from eight export-oriented sectors, including the RMG, the country can now boast it is free of child labour in the formal domain of industries. Reports of child labour used furtively in some factories, however, keep trickling in. Moreover, there is the vast informal sector which employs a large number of child workers. Against this backdrop, the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) released its National Child Labour Survey 2022 at its office in Dhaka on July 19.
The 2022 survey showed that the country's child labour has increased by 4.54 per cent to 1.77 million in 10 years. Alongside the humble increase, the number of children engaged in hazardous jobs dropped to 1.068 million in 2022 from 1.280 million in 2013. In normal accounting, it might have meant a remarkable drop in child employment in hazardous professions. Given the periodical media reports of children aged 5-17 engaged in multiple types of hazardous jobs, the 2022 portrayal of children in unsafe work leaves space for deep thoughts. As has been observed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), child labour is work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development. It defines hazardous child labour as work that is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children. It includes work in dangerous or unhealthy environments, like quarrying, agriculture, and machine-tool and smelting factories.
In Bangladesh context, engaging children in brick kilns, public transport, motor workshops, dingy factories manufacturing hazardous objects, and dozens of other types of sweat shops is considered detrimental to children's normal healthy growth. As a general rule, the hapless children have to undergo a series of deleterious impacts on their school education, health and social life. The BBS survey notes the percentage of working children---those who are hired permanently as workers that prevents them from going to school and threatens their physical and psychological health, has increased to 8.90 per cent in 2022, compared to 8.70 per cent found in the 2013 survey.
Child labour, now prevailing in the poorer and developing countries, is indisputably recognised as a social curse. Upon letting it go unchecked, the morally strong people find it to be a blot on conscience. It's heartening to note that child rights protection groups and other rights platforms have long been engaged in the movement to fight against child labour in hazardous jobs. The international organisations are playing their part in upholding the case for children in hazardous work. During the pandemic period in June 2021, the United Nations said that child labour has risen for the first time in 20 years, with one in 10 children in work worldwide and millions more are at risk due to Covid-19. Not many of the children forced to drop out from school, could be brought back because before economy could turn around, soaring energy price and Russia-Ukraine war made an economic recovery for the low-income families impossible. There was a need for a special programme to extend financial support to vulnerable families of school-going children in order to arrest drop-out and child labour.