By Sunil Kataria
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – For 4 many years Indian Nobel peace laureate Kailash Satyarthi rescued 1000’s of youngsters from the scourge of slavery and trafficking however he fears all his efforts might reverse because the coronavirus pandemic forces youngsters into labour.
“The largest risk is that hundreds of thousands of youngsters might fall again into slavery, trafficking, little one labour, little one marriage,” stated Satyarthi who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for his work to fight little one labour and little one trafficking in India.
Because the pandemic pummels the Indian financial system, pushing hundreds of thousands of individuals into poverty, households are beneath strain to place their youngsters to work to make ends meet.
Whereas charges of kid labour have declined over the previous couple of years, about 10.1 million youngsters are nonetheless in some type of servitude in India, in response to the United Nations youngsters’s company UNICEF.
Throughout India little one labourers may be present in quite a lot of industries resembling brick kilns, carpet-weaving, garment-making, home service, agriculture, fisheries and mining.
Earlier this month, Satyarthi’s organisation backed by police rescued dozens of women throughout a raid on a shrimp processing unit in western India.
“As soon as youngsters fall into that entice they might be pulled into prostitution and might be trafficked simply … that is one other hazard which authorities have to deal with now,” he stated, including that he believed sexual abuse of youngsters was additionally on the rise because of the pandemic.
“I can’t be glad even when one single little one is enslaved … it means there’s something improper in our polity, in our financial system, in our society, we now have to make sure that not a single little one is disregarded,” he informed Reuters.
(Writing by Rupam Jain; Enhancing by Stephen Coates)
