Eliminating Child Labor in India through Conditional Cash Transfers

India does have many laws against child labor. The Factories Act and the Child Labor Acts both rule that children below the age of 14 cannot work in factories or hazardous industries. The 2009 Free and Compulsory Education Act mandates that children attend school until the age of 14 and that private schools allocate 25% seats to disadvantaged children. However, these laws have not been enough to redirect children from very impoverished, indebted or business oriented families to school. Child labor thrives because many families rely on the marginal additional income from their child – especially when the working parent is disabled. It exists because although tuition is free, books and uniforms are expensive to buy. Sometimes, it happens because the child is too hungry, playful, or uninterested to be in school and the parents themselves don’t realize the importance of education.  The problem becomes more prevalent after the legally mandated age of schooling, 14 .

What can India do to put more children in school instead of in the workplace? One potential solution is to implement a conditional cash transfer program tailored for the country.

The program would work like this: For families that earn below sustenance wage in communities with very high incidence of child labor, the government will offer the same sum of money that their working child would be expected to make. Additionally, it would guarantee free books and uniforms, given that families provide proof of the child attending at least 80% of the classes and show that they have been making good academic progress. If proof is found that a cash-receiving family still sends their child to full-time work, or that any fraud has been involved in recording attendance by authorities, all benefits shall be immediately terminated. Such a conditional cash transfer has a two-fold impact: One, that the original financial reason for the family to send their child to work is removed and two, parents now have an incentive to encourage their child to regularly attend, and do well, in school. This way, governments can ensure that taxpayers’ money go towards truly empowering the needy youth, thus strengthening system-wide benefits for the whole nation.

A conditional cash-transfer program is not a new idea. A similar program, called Progresa, has already been implemented in Mexico, that rewards not only students for attending school but also their families for accessing preventative healthcare. Moreover, it’s reward amounts are varied, higher for girls and older students at greater risk of dropping out. Founded in 2002, Progresa has since built an impressive record of success. Another cash-back program has been implemented in India itself, called Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which has paid women who give birth in medical institutions with the goal of reducing child mortality rates. It too, has had great success, increasing institutional birthing to 49% from 20% in just 5 years.

Thus, there is strong evidence that conditional cash transfer programs can bring important societal change. Given the complexity of child-labor conditions in India, it would be practical to execute the program phase-by-phase, and document all transactions electronically so that any misuse gets noticed. Further research has to be done to establish eligibility and verification standards for education-based cash transfers, but compared to the mammoth consequences that child labor will have, implementing this education cash-transfer program now is a much more intelligent, solvable problem to take on.

*For more information about Child Labor in India and how you can help in the fight against it, watch this fascinating YouTube Film called “The Price of Free” which shows the work of Kailash Satyarthi. Donate to his initiatives to directly support the cause of freeing currently enslaved child laborers.