In 2021, when the National Child Labour Project (NCLP), a Union Labour Ministry project to eradicate child labour, was wound up and merged with Samagra Siksha Abhiyan (SSA), a Union Ministry of Education scheme, many of the children rescued had already returned to their previous workplaces due to various reasons, reported TNIE.
In 2017, a 13-year-old boy C Venkatesh was rescued from a brick kiln in a place called Tattayangarpettai near Musiri, Tamil Nadu, and was enrolled in a Special Training Centre (STC) located near the brick kiln that provided him with an education. Fast forward to 2022, after the Ministry of Labour and Employment, issued a formal notice on March 2022 to subsume the NCLP under SSA, the centres that were run by NCLP were shut down resulting in Venkatesh to return to his work again in the brick kiln along with his parents.
Venkatesh's mother Mohana said they were not able to afford the transport charges that it would cost for him to reach school. "The stipend of Rs 400 we received was stopped from March and why would we spend so much money for education, when we earn a mere amount of Rs 300 a day?" she told TNIE.
Similarly, Deivanai, mother of 13-year-old boy Prabhu, at the Narikuravar colony in Devarayaneri, Tiruchy, said that due to social circumstances, most of their children won't usually go to school. "When the centre was here, the teachers would persuade our children to at least sit in the classes that kept our children out of bad habits," she added.
A teacher at NCLP said that the centre in Devarayaneri, one among the 10 in the district, had around 30 children till the March of 2022, but now they were clueless about the state of children as most of them go out with their parents to support their business. Another NCLP staff R Sasikala at the Manachanallur centre told TNIE that the children in that centre were mostly from Karnataka and were now pushed into begging by their parents. After the closure of the centres, they have started going along with their parents to places like Samayapurma and Srirangam, among others in Tiruchy.
"Government schools in that area were not ready to enrol those children as most of the time the teachers of the school would be asked to sign in a ledger at the nearby police station, whenever the children get caught begging in any nearby areas. Fearing these procedures, schools would refuse to enroll them, so they would be in NCLP centers at least getting some benefits," Sasikala added.
Under the NCLP Scheme, working children in the age group 9-14 years are rescued or withdrawn from employment and enrolled in STCs, where they are provided with bridge education, vocational training, mid-day meals, stipend and healthcare. An activist from Erode district, Sudar Natarajan, who works closely with children's education told TNIE that many of the tribal children who are living inside the dense forest were benefiting from these centers that were located in their respective hamlets, but after the centres were closed, the children have no means to travel 10 km to reach the government schools.
He added, "Once the centres were closed, the children were officially enrolled in their nearby schools, but due to lack of proper monitoring by the SSA, they are not attending schools." According to sources in NCLP, after the project was subsumed under SSA, there was no close monitoring by the SSA officials and they did not ensure that the rescued children were attending schools regularly, which led to the rescued children enrolled in mainstream schools discontinuing their education.
The source added, "SSA does not facilitate for the students to reach the school which means the students have no way to travel to the school which will be usually few kilometres away." Citing sources, TNIE reported that at the inception of the project in 1988, around 2 lakh children were enrolled and around 1,20,000 were mainstreamed. And in Tiruchy alone, 28,000 were rescued and 11,000 were enrolled in mainstream schools. S Pearline, Project Director of NCLP in Tiruchy, told TNIE that they would go for proper fieldwork to ensure the children rescued were attending the schools regularly. She added that seeing children return to labour work seems like their efforts were nullified.
According to a Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL) study in Tamil Nadu released in 2021, the number of child labourers increased by 280% from 2019. The main reason quoted for the increase in the percentage was COVID-related economic constraints faced by families across the country. R Vidyasagar, former Child Protection Specialist at UNICEF, while speaking of the increase in child labour said, "This is a crucial time to tighten the monitoring of children rescued from labour works but the decision of Union government to subsume the project under SSA dilutes the very purpose of the project."
Vidyasagar added that the rescued children cannot immediately be accommodated in mainstream schools where teachers would be expecting considerable results from the students. "STCs remained a bridge where the students would be used to attending schools and studying regularly and after a certain period of nine months to two years they would be admitted to mainstream schools," he said. He added that he was skeptical of the education of children who had already been rescued, and on what basis the authorities were going to proceed in rescuing other children.
When contacted, a senior SSA official in Tiruchy said they would be monitoring the rescued children regularly. When TNIE contacted the state-level SSA Additional State Project Director, R Sudhan, he did not respond to the questions asked on how they would be regulating the monitoring of the education of these rescued children.
