Karachi Mayor Wasim Akhtar has said 33 per cent children in Pakistan are forced into child labour after poverty, joblessness and inflation took them away from schools.
Addressing a delegation of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working for the welfare of the children on the eve of World Day against Child Labour, Akhtar said that 13 million children in the country were being forced to do labour work and their number was increasing day by day, which was surely a sign of concern. He said the children wanted to get education but it had turned out to be just a desire for them.
The mayor was of the view that the entire world had been in the grip of COVID-19 and people of every age group, including children, were getting infected with the virus across the globe. He said that during the pandemic, it had now become even more important to save children from forced labour as they were working at factories, streets and markets in an unhealthy environment. "Eighty per cent of child labour get hepatitis and other fatal diseases owing to consumption of water unfit for humans," he added.
Akhtar said that it was a dilemma that we saw different labouring tools in the children’s hands instead of books. Unfortunately, child labour was not considered a bad thing in our society as we often saw children working at hotels, tea kiosks, factories and mechanic shops, he added.
"We should make people aware about the demerits of child labour and motivate them to make suitable environment for education and welfare of the children."
The mayor said that in Pakistan, we had legislation to curb the child labour but the Children Act,1991, and Employees of Children Rules,1995, were not implemented in letter and spirit. He regretted that abuse cases of children working at homes were reported so often but no measures were adopted to halt such incidents.
He said that children were our future and we were destroying that future with our own hands.
There was a dire need to eradicate child labour from the country and make it mandatory to provide education to every child, he added.
Akhtar said that child labour had almost been eradicated from the entire world but in Pakistan it was expanding. “The parents of such children should also be given financial assistance so that they could send their kids to school rather than to shops or factory," he concluded.