The Hindu : No child must work: Shantha Sinha

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 31, 2003

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No child must work: Shantha Sinha

By K. Venkateshwarlu

HYDERABAD JULY 30. "It vindicates our consistent stand that no child must work and all children should go to full-time formal school." That was how 53-year-old Shantha Sinha reacted on being chosen for the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award for Community Leadership.

A relentless fighter for the rights of the child, warm, affable and down-to-earth, Ms. Sinha has won the award for her intensive work on elimination of child labour through universalisation of elementary education in Ranga Reddy district of Andhra Pradesh, a State with the highest percentage of child labour.

As secretary of the M V Foundation, she was instrumental in setting up a string of bridge schools across 491 villages of this educationally backward district that has helped till date over a lakh children in the 5-14 age group to get out of the clutches of bonded labour and join the mainstream schools, during the last 12 years. The Foundation has expanded its activities to seven more districts in the last three years.

"The award lends confidence, legitimacy and authority to our strong view that the best place for the child is the formal school. There should not be any compromise on that score. All children out of school should be counted as child labour," she told The Hindu soon after receiving the news of the award. A steady stream of visitors called her at her office at West Maredpalli in Secunderabad this evening to congratulate her.

Ms. Sinha does not believe in what she calls the "poverty argument", that poor families need their children's income to survive. "The tragedy of the child labour situation in the country is that every labourer is presumed to work because it is an issue of survival for the family. It is the most insidious aspect of this argument and it is not true. If it were true then in every village the poorest should drop out from school first and enter the labour market."

"In contrast, villages are full of examples of children of very poor families in school, while their relatively better off counterparts are working," she said. Parents go to any extent to make sacrifices to send their children to school. Even they have a latent desire to seek a better future for their children through education. "It is not the economic situation but tradition, ignorance of illiterate parents, lack of access to alternatives, facilities at school that govern the decision to send a child to work or to school," Ms. Sinha said.

Does it mean there is no link between poverty, child labour and illiteracy? "Yes there is, but it has very little to do with economic compulsion that poverty implies. Child labour and illiteracy is yet another example of the poor not being heard because they are not important enough. It arises out of an inability on the part of the poor to access the right quarters and to articulate their demand effectively. It is an entitlement that the poor have been denied."

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