Labour
Free Carpet?
With over 250 million of children working around the world, child labor is increasingly becoming a major issue of concern for international community. India is one of the worlds' leading countries in terms of number of child labors with their estimated number between 60 and 115 million.
Child labor exists because children are a source of additional
income
for poor families. Families need money to survive. Alternative sources
of income for poor families are more or less non-existent. To survive,
to maintain the economic level of households, most poor families make
their children work in the form of work for wages or bonded laborers. Children in India are employed in almost all the activities of the non-formal sector. The rugs industry is one such industry which is ill-famed for employing children. With adequate number of children put to work, more number of rugs can be made in smaller time intervals. A significant number of children working in such type of looms / factories are actually kidnapped and stolen from their families.
According to an estimate about 500,000 children are believed to be working in the hand-weaving rugs and carpet industry in South Asia today. An ILO study estimated that there could be 420,000 child laborers in India employed in the carpet industry, although there is considerable disagreement over the exact number of children weaving in India's carpet industry. The child laborers sometimes, as young as 4 years of age, are coerced to hand-weave rugs and carpets, under painful and inhuman conditions. They are barely fed, work on a few hours of sleep, and sometimes their hands are burned with irons so that they do not bleed on the rugs. This is indeed a very horrifying situation in the country.
| Why carpet makers prefer to use
children in carpet making? There are three main advantages of using child labor to the carpet makers:
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