Indian child workers on the rise as coronavirus forces them out of school
- India has more than 56 million children out of school, according to a 2018 study
- Activists fear children may be used as a stopgap measure to fill jobs left vacant by migrant labourers who returned to their hometowns during the lockdown
Maheshwari Munkalapally, 16, and her 15-year-old sister stopped attending lessons when virtually the entire economy was brought to a halt during the world’s biggest lockdowns.
Maheshwari’s mother and older sister lost their jobs as housemaids in Hyderabad, the capital of the southern Indian state of Telangana. The younger girls, who had been living with their grandmother in a nearby village, were forced to become farmhands along with their mother.
“Working under the sun was difficult as we were never used to it,” Maheshwari said. “But we have to work at least to buy rice and other groceries.”
Even prior to the pandemic, numbers of children out of school in India and in child labour were high
It is difficult to quantify the number of children affected since the pandemic broke out, but civil society groups are rescuing more of them from forced labour, and warn that many others are being compelled to work in cities because of the migrant labour shortage there.
Even before the outbreak, India was struggling to keep children in school.