Children Working In Coal Mines

If it's true I would sign a petition with you. I find horrible that this type of thing does still happen all around the world.

As for 8 year olds working...My 8 year old is the only of my three children who actively helps around the house. He trys to help with cutting grass and shoveling snow. He cleans up the play room and helps with the dishes and laundry. (always with me, of course) His brother is 14 and sister is 18 and are both just shy of useless.

We receive a lot of hoax emails and in this case I do not have the means to correlate the info.

www.amusingplanet.com/.../child-labor-in-indian-coal-mines.html

Some of the photos shows old equipment from 50 years back or more and shown along with recent photos it may create the impression that it is the present situation.

I don't think even a fourth world country still mines like that.

Please India prove them wrong.!!!!

As a teenager I did enter a horizontal shaft of an abandoned mine (on the site where the first nugget was found) and collected some material which I later panned.

I had to obtain a permit from the authorities to keep it.

I believe at present the homeless are mining abandoned mines. (maybe also using child labour or initiated by children)

It looks like a legitimate (believable) story to me, from the present (May 19, 2011), and with an LA Times photojournalist involved. I

If anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'm interested.

Below, I'm made a clickable link to the story, and posted some quotes.

So, what would you suggest be done? Sign a petition? Create a law making it illegal? Something else to keep those 8 year olds from working and, thus, possibly, they, or their families, eating?

My (partial) opinion is that any of those are dealing with a symptom of the problem, and not the cause. (Sometimes you have to deal with symptoms, so I'm not totally arguing against doing that.) But we should look for and try to deal with the root cause of problems like this.

IMHO, a big part of the root cause is overpopulation, and we need to figure out ways to address that problem.

Instead of, or in addition to signing that petition (or donating money that will probably never make it to the presumed intended beneficiary (or only a small percentage will make it there), think about what else you can do to identify and deal with the root problem. (Maybe it's not overpopulation--if not, let's figure out what it is.)

Child Labor in Indian Coal Mines

Thursday, May 19, 2011
Posted by Admin at 10:55 AM

Times photojournalist Daniel Berehulak, along with Mark Magnier, reported a fantastic photo essay on the mining situation in the Jaintia Hills district of India, located in the northeastern state of Meghalaya. Perhaps as many as thousands of underage workers as young as 8, lured by the wages, leave school to work in coal mines under perilous conditions. The country officially upholds mining safety standards and forbids child labor, but loopholes in state laws allow widespread abuses. The young miners descend on rickety ladders made of branches into the makeshift coal mines, scrambling sideways into "rat hole" shafts so small that even kneeling becomes impossible. Lying horizontally, they hack away with picks and their bare hands: Human labor here is far cheaper than machines.

...

Jaintia Hills, India - A young boy named Fight, believed to be 8 years old, shovels coal at a depot. Local schools in the area, providing free tuition, find it difficult to convince parents of the benefits of education, as children are seen as sources of income.

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Ladrymbai, India - The wages offered for mining coal lures many children to leave school and work.

Why UN supports their govt. People there don,t have social security ,clean water,electricity,employment,medicines,roads etc (inadequate) but they have the "bomb",missiles and even sending space probes to moon. Many do not have toilets in homes instead use open fields. What is UN doing?. What is "regional power" ,what % of people are below poverty level?.

It's probably real, the parents get injured so the kids have to work.

You don't have to go back to the eighteen hundreds to find children in dangerous jobs, there are some Lewis Hine pictures documenting this, from a hundred years ago.

The problem remains where poverty is existing. It becomes difficult to control this by legislation. For example these links shows it existing in other poor sectors all over.

As pointed out one has to look at the root cause not the effect. Which of the parent doesn't want its children to study and grow in social ladder?

But that is a long term investment. When the current is survival, then every extra hand matters even if it is a tiny pair of hands whose only work must have been to hold a pencil or crayon.

If it does not hold the shovel, then the total family, including the child will starve. But then that is how cruel the life is.

But instead of signing petitions are we doing anything? We leave everything in hands of the government and rest.

As an Indian, I know the problem exists and not in a negligible scale. But this is not a legislative problem, it is a social problem and exist everywhere where the survival demand (even in rich countries a worse form of child labour exist).

Today child Labour have become a Global Social Issue, no one is bother about it. Everybody need their work to be done, this has create a serious issue which should be consider earlier to stop child labour.

According to UNICEF "An estimated 246 million children are engaged in child labour. Nearly 70 per cent (171 million) of these children work in hazardous conditions – including working in mines, working with chemicals and pesticides in agriculture or with dangerous machinery. They are everywhere, but invisible, toiling as domestic servants in homes, labouring behind the walls of workshops, hidden from view in plantations. The vast majority of working children – about 70 per cent – work in the agriculture sector ."

Sources:

http://unicef.in/Whatwedo/21/Child-Labour

https://www.studytoday.net/child-labour/