Almost every day a child is reported to be brutalised or dead in some affluent household. The child can be male or female. Gender makes no difference. His/her age usually ranges between seven and fifteen years. The child in most cases is an ‘informal employee’ which means a domestic help. The cause in case of death is nothing other than torture. It’s an unnatural death. A ticker on TV screens runs for a few hours giving you some details of the happening. The parents of the dead child are shown wailing who fail to find solace in the banal statements issued by politicians and police. But soon the disturbing images and voices are lost in the cacophony of impotently angry political talk shows designed to clarify ‘issues of national importance’ that provide a narrow window of catharsis to the people fed up to the back teeth with their lot.

Child labour that exposes children of tender age to foreseeable and unforeseeable risks has a number of aspects which need to be looked at for an understanding of the situation. Child labour is prohibited, the legal documents tell us. But law and its implementation in this land of the pure are two different species. Laws are meant to be enshrined in the books. Practice is dictated by whims of the people who wield socio-economic power. So the phenomenon of child labour, though against the law, is all over the place.

The rich and the poor both are responsible to varying degree for this painful mess. The poor produce babies like rabbits knowing all the way that they ill-afford the upbringing of their children in a class society that values work, not worker. They also suffer from the ill-conceived notion that a child born has one mouth and two hands. That provides the rich with dirt cheap labour in the shape of child workers over whom they have absolute control. The poor parents are paid paltry sums in advance as wages and they hand over their children to the well-fed people, used to luxury. There is no written agreement between the two parties as child labour is illegal. Terms of so-called employment, if any, are based on verbal understanding that have no legal standing if and when a child ends up brutalised or, in the worst case, dead after some terrible but preventable mishap.

The houses where poor children are forced to serve are apparently not chambers of horrors. The heads of households that employ child labour may have diverse backgrounds but what they have in common is the class. They are upper or upper middle strata. Among them you find sophisticated bureaucrats, learned judges, popular politicians, polished industrialists, religiously inclined traders and traditional landlords. The list can be quite impressive and long. You normally don’t expect cruel treatment being meted out to unfortunate children whose parents can’t take care of them as they have no pecuniary advantage due to their being at the lowest rung of the economic ladder. But cruelties are inflicted on the children who in no way can defend themselves. They are kept undernourished in the houses that display on their dining tables delectable food in abundance. But the children are given the leftovers and that too in a measured quantity. If underage children make mistakes inadvertently they are subjected to severe corporal punishment that put their life and limbs at extreme risk. There is no realisation that such a treatment is inhuman.

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The reasons for such apathy are rooted in the power structure that sanctifies caste and class-driven social norms as universal or universally acceptable. Some are born to rule while others are there to be ruled, goes the traditional logic. The poor in our society find themselves in double jeopardy; they bear the brunt of class and caste biases handed down from generation to generation in a historical process that equips the powerful with newer tools to perpetuate poverty. Poverty historically enriches those who create it. Most of the impoverished come from the professions that have been, until recent times, irrevocably bound with lower castes. Class created caste or vice versa in the subcontinent is a matter of debate. In our context what is evident is that low-caste status helps perpetuate the low-economic status and the low-economic status helps perpetuate the low-caste status. They complement each other in an unending vicious cycle.