In the last week of April, I participated in a seminar organised by a group of civil society members. They have long been demanding that the age of children covered under the Child Labour Prohibition and Rehabilitation Act – 1986 be increased to 18 years. As the panelists pointed out the loopholes in the existing laws and the immediate need to study the situation, so that the long sought Right to Free and Compulsory Education of Children from 6 – 14 years does not go down in the drains, it would look like a top-down approach to any naïve person as I am.

For, at the end of the day, when I walk out of the hall, I see children working in tapris, hotels, shouting their lungs out to sell safety pins, hair clips, bindis, carpets, hand towels, naphthalene balls, combs, air pillows etc. The list is unimaginably long. The best place to witness this scene is in the suburban trains of Mumbai. No matter how crowded the compartment is, here he comes… saying ‘wiz…wiz…wiz’…carrying huge polythenes filled with different articles. And then he goes off with that same ‘wiz…wiz…wiz’. New in Mumbai, at 21, I used to miss at least two trains before I got into one, scared of the crowd and not skilled enough to push myself into the compartment, but these little fellows moved with the crowd; rather, they had to.

In many circumstances, the bottomline is ‘the right of choice’. Why did we choose to move on with these children hard at work, knowing that they were supposed to be learning that seven eights are fifty six? I don’t know. But I do know that most of us have learnt to live with these practices around. We only go to the extent of stating that ‘things will not change’. Can we not say ‘no’ to the chai served by the little chap? Or is it the fear of embarrassment to voice our views that are indeed correct?

To talk of the log in my eyes, even I don’t do that. I can ask the hotel authorities to check the leakage in the tap when I spot one, at the same time, I have never questioned the presence of a child cleaning the tables in hotels. The difference between the two is what I wanted to articulate through this article, but am afraid that I’m not able to do that. A couple of weeks back, I saw a north-east guy, must be somewhere between 15 and 17 years of age, working in a juice shop in the heart of the city (Chennai). He was four months old there, I learnt. As for the looks I had to meet when I asked that question, you can imagine! Why would he travel so long, down south, for this job? Maybe he was trafficked. Or was this a kind of trend, I could not understand.

The volley of questions that came up made me realise how complicated child poverty is in our country. Exacerbating the situation of child poverty is the prevalence of anti-social elements that have been portrayed reasonably well on silver screen. Yet, the question remains – did the message trickle down? Are we caring enough for our children, who are claimed to be the ‘assets’of future India?

At this juncture, I am only reminded of one of my best and favorite speeches that I had made at ‘Talk your way to London’, in August 2003, as a student of class XI. I had quoted my favorite lines from Ms Indira Gandhi’s ‘This India’ – ‘Whenever we plant a tree or build a road or inculcate good habits, it is not for ourselves alone but also for those who are to be born in the years to come’. Having said that, we need to admit the tendency to cocoon ourselves in our comfort zones, thinking umpteen times before raising our voices for our very own concerns.

After all this introspection, will I be able to speak for children in the day-to-day scenes I come across? It is not all that bad to make some noise, isn’t it?