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Children who are supposed to grow up to be the pillars of the future of the country have to put their lives at risk and go into child labor. Due to poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and family discord, many children in Nepal are in the grip of child labour.
State mechanisms and child rights organizations have been active for decades to end child labor, but even now, there are 1.1 million children in Nepal according to official statistics. The government has been implementing a 10-year master plan to end the worst forms of child labor by 2079 and eliminate child labor completely by 2082. Children are being used in more risky jobs as there is no work according to the master plan implemented a decade ago. According to the child labor-free local level procedure-2077, only 8 out of 753 municipalities across the country have been declared child labor-free in 10 years, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security.
A recent study by the Central Statistics Department and the International Labor Organization (ILO) shows that 53.3 percent of children between the ages of five and 17 are engaged in various forms of labor. According to the National Census 2078, the number of children under the age of 18 in Nepal is 9,869,583. Out of 11 lakh children involved in child labour, 222 thousand 493 (3.2 percent) are used in hazardous work. It is a worrisome problem for the state that children are forced to engage in hazardous labor at a time when they should be engaged in personality development by fully enjoying the rights of children.
Article 39 of the constitution states that under the rights of children, they cannot be employed in factories, mines or other such hazardous work. Similarly, the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act-2056 also prohibits employment of minors. According to this act, brick kilns, mines, factories, transport, road trade, textile and shoemaking, domestic child labor, child porters are termed as hazardous child labor. The law provides that children under 14 years of age will be fined 50,000 or imprisoned for one year or both for doing hazardous work. Likewise, the Labor Act-2074, with the aim of ending all conditions of labor exploitation, provides that children cannot be employed in a way that violates the law.
If we look at the history of legal and policy efforts initiated by the government to end child labor, child labor should have been reduced to zero so far. Nepal started efforts to end child labor 35 years ago in 1990 by ratifying the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Similarly, Nepal has ratified the International Labor Organization Convention (182) on Degraded Child Labor in 1999, but it seems that it has not yet found an effective way to end child labor. Among the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations to be completed by the year 2030, the goal is to immediately adopt effective measures to end all forms of child labor by the year 2025. Nepal must also fulfill this goal. For this reason, the government has implemented the National Master Plan, but due to lack of effective implementation, the problem of child labor has worsened. The
master plan has strategies such as regular monitoring, rescuing, rehabilitating and searching for children involved in child labor, rehabilitating them in the society through directly targeted programs, cooperation, coordination and network establishment and operation among stakeholders. 17 sectors including domestic child labor, child porters, and agricultural child labor are not prioritized according to the master plan, so children have to work in risky jobs.
Even the national master plan on child labor prevention, created by the government to achieve sustainable development goals, has been ineffective many times. Previously, the Child Labor National Master Plan 2061-2071 was created to prevent child labor, but after that master plan got stuck in the middle, the Ministry of Labor again created the Child Labor National Master Plan (2075-2085). In addition, the government has made a policy to have child rights committees and child welfare officers at every local level. According to which, the Child Rights Committee at the local level should monitor child labor. But the government has not paid attention to monitoring child labor and punishing the culprits.
Most Nepalis are employed abroad because there are not enough opportunities and jobs in the country. Because parents are employed abroad, some children's basic needs such as care, education, health, and nutrition are not met. It seems that some parents send their children to labor against their will because of poverty.
If the educated, capable, qualified and the class that should be developed as the backbone of the state are entangled in child labor, the country will go into decline and the citizens will still fall under the grip of poverty. Therefore, to end child labor, state mechanisms and organizations working in the field of child rights should be sensitive and proceed with a clear action plan. Positive results can be obtained only if all levels and agencies and stakeholders of the state take the prevention of child labor as a major, mandatory and common task and make continuous efforts.
