The Hindu Business Line : In Kerala, kids are just lucky

LAST Saturday, June 12, was designated the `World Day Against Child Labour' by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to focus world attention on the urgent need to eradicate child labour.

No one can quarrel with that lofty aim, for the facts are chilling: Around the world, about 246 million children between 5 and 17 years old are working instead of attending school. That translates into one out of every six children in the world today - which means that one out of six children is a worker, not a play-school goer or a primary school student or just a plain brat, struggling to grow up.

Nearly three-quarters of the world's child labourers - about 180 million children - are exposed to the worst forms of child labour, that is, work that is hazardous for children. That equals one out of every eight children around the world.

The ILO estimates that around 2.5 million children are economically active in the developed economies, 2.4 million in the transition countries, over 17 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 48 million in Sub-Saharan Africa and more than 13 million in the Middle East and North Africa.

Yet, in that very region is one little pocket that deserves to be noticed for the relative absence of child labour in its most pernicious forms - the State of Kerala. Whatever its other drawbacks - and these are not few, despite the coastal State's balmy clime - Kerala society has largely succeeded in shielding its children from the vagaries of an abusive and exploitative combination of housework, schoolwork and wage labour.

Particularly pivotal to Kerala's success as a development model for a gender-neutral (again, relatively speaking) process of distribution of wealth, power and opportunity is the role for the girl-child.

As far back as 1875, the author of Travancore's census report wrote that among matrilineal groups "a female child is prized more highly than a male one." Later, more into the new era, the Census Commissioner of Travancore reported that "female lives are more valued than male ones."

By the 1850s, girls' boarding schools run by Christian missionaries could be found in Travancore, and Christians of all sects began to realise that imparting a certain level of education to their girl-children would pay huge dividends in the long run.

"Without schools, the place of women in Kerala would be very different," says Australian academic and long-time Kerala watcher Robin Jeffrey. "Women's place in old Kerala - the degree of autonomy derived from matriliny and the potential freedoms to be extracted from Christianity - explains why girls were sent off so readily to formal schools."

"The school system," Jeffrey continues, "became the robing room where two or three generations of women shed aspects of the matrilineal culture that had allowed them to be there in the first place."

June Kane, the author of ILO's new report `Helping Hands or Shackled Lives? Understanding Child Domestic Labour and Responses to It', says: "We have to remind ourselves that children are not just doing `odd jobs'; they are in a workplace - even if it is someone else's home."

Yes, they should not be there - and to learn how to keep them out of harm's way and on a trajectory of opportunities, look no farther than Kerala.

The writer can be contacted at kg@tug.org.in

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