Is Child Labour entirely bad?

From the lines of today

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelhi/article3530207.ece

If you are above 18-19 years in age, you must remember there used to be a movie 'Muqaddar ka Sikandar' in Bollywood and a popular one starring Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha with one of the best songs of times.

If you have seen this, you must have got an idea about where I am going with this.

I completely agree with the fact that education should be a birthright to everyone. In fact I strongly support it. But it does not change the fact that there are millions of homeless children. Leave homeless, let's come to hungry. Imagine an adolescent boy say 16 yrs of age with a younger sibling of an age say 10yrs. The boy like any other loves his sibling the most in the world. Irrespective of the fact that they have parents or not, if the younger one is hungry, do you think its wrong for the boy to want to do anything he can to feed his sibling? What do you think is better : they both sleep hungry or the elder one can earn to atleast save the future of the younger one.

There is a whole another big aspect if the child is a girl, but she probably is doomed in all the options there are. She is not safe anywhere so may be we will talk about that some other time.

Or do you think begging for money on signals is way better, or if they become a pocket thief, or may be collecting plastic and metal from trash is better? Because they have to eat, you know. If you don't let them work for say a better job like being a waiter, either they will consider these really bad options or they will die of hunger.

Someone might raise a point that there are homes for homeless but we all know how good they are. We all saw that news of a homeless shelter on Punjab which was actually just a way of earning money by making the kids do wrong things. I am not saying that everyone can be the Amitabh of 'Muqaddar ka Sikander' but till the time its not harmful (harmful like working in a chemical factory), the child is not underpaid and he/she is mature enough then I think the better thing to do would be to take care of the above two things of being harmful and underpayment.

May be their pride will automatically make them good citizens. Also, we can have some NGOs, like the ones for women, which can meet a group of such kids from time to time and talk to them about all this stuff. I really have not thought this solution through but I hope you understand what I am trying to say here even if you do not agree with me.

Please understand that I am not supporting or justifying child labour! No!!! Childhood should be a nice and educative memory to everyone and it should be everyone's birthright. My point is that due to the hell lot of corruption we have in this country, the policies might not help anyone and it would take some time for NGOs to reach to every child. Meanwhile, all I am saying is working and being self dependent is a lot better than begging or stealing!

Sanitation issues in the country

There is this article in today's newspaper

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelhi/article3526123.ece

and it left me wondering about a lot of related things. I have seen this manual scavenging of human waste. When I was a little kid (~2-3 years old), we had a toilet at the roof of our old haveli, and this cleaning lady used to come with a vessel on her head, and would collect the waste in that vessel and leave and the pay she used to get was really minimal. She belonged to a backward class and a whole big group of these people used to live in a colony very separate from others.

Though I have thought about a lot of issues which we Indians are suffering from, this somehow never occurred to me till I saw the movie Aarakshan, where Saif Ali Khan mentions this in one of his fights. This doesn't happen now in my hometown as the sanitation has improved, but the article made me realize that it still happens in a big part of the country.

But when I read this article to the end, an even bigger question came to my mind. The solution which this article suggests, is that really effective? I mean do those Sulabh shauchalayas  actually solve the issue? This article talks about hygiene but let me ask you this : the ones which have been built under this scheme, are they hygienic? I have seen a lot of public washrooms and none of them was ever clean, not at all hygienic. Unhygienic washrooms can invite a lot of infectious diseases and otherwise also its just ughhhh....

My point is not that the solution is wrong, its just that the solution has not been thought through or it might be that its not implemented. Make people aware that they are responsible for these. May be appointing one or two people in all the public washrooms to tell people about their proper usage. Washrooms are maintained in office buildings, hospitals, malls and a lot of other places. Same can be the way to maintain the public ones.

What I want to say is that just building the washrooms doesn't solve the purpose! Keeping them clean does!