A recent article in the Toronto Star newspaper focuses on some disturbing examples of children as young as four working long days on the Games facilities.
Meet four-year-old Ajay.
Source: Rick Westhead | TheStar.com
NEW DELHI—It’s crunch time in New Delhi and Ajay, a bright-eyed four-year-old with cropped hair and a handsome smile, is working 13-hour days to help the city get ready for the Commonwealth Games. Every day for the past year, Ajay and his older brother Golu, who is eight, have worked alongside their parents in various gritty construction zones in the Indian capital. They leave their home in a local slum here in time to arrive at work at 7 each morning. They don’t begin to head home until 8 p.m.
While their parents do heavier manual labour for a combined $5.50 a day, their children spend days breaking up rocks and fetching water.
On Saturday, as the first Canadian athletes were leaving Toronto for India, Ajay and his brother were busy digging trenches for underground electrical cables along a stretch of highway connecting the Commonwealth Games’ athlete’s village to a rugby stadium.
Ajay’s father Pappu, a 30-year-old who arrived a few years ago in New Delhi from Kahkatwa, a small farming village the south Indian state Madhya Pradesh, said he knows his kids should be in school.
“But I’m poor and have nothing,” Pappu said, stooping to adjust a new cable laid by his children. “I have no way to pay for their school or for someone to watch them so they come and work with us.”
Throughout this city of 16 million, workers are frantically painting drywall, bleach cleaning apartment housing for some 7,000 athletes and coaches, and trying to put the finishing touches on construction projects. Officials promise everything will come together by Oct. 3, the date of the Commonwealth Games opening ceremonies. But the rush to finish on time has also highlighted a tragic side of this fast-growing country: the fact India has fumbled efforts to keep children out of the workforce.
“There is a wide acceptance of child labour,” said Shireen Miller, an official with the advocacy group Save The Children’s India-based chapter. “We see children working as domestics in people’s homes, in tea shops, in brick kilns and in construction sites. And nobody is outraged by it. Some people even think these children are being done a favour. People must see it’s no longer acceptable anymore.”
Miller said on Friday night she began to ponder how her agency might use the Commonwealth Games as a platform for drawing more attention to the highly charged issue. The United Nations estimates that there are 60 million children in India’s workforce.
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