Bhupender Yadav Clears Air on Child Labour Data, Says New Portal Created to Look into Complaints

Labour and employment minister Bhupender Yadav clarified on Monday that the data on the children working in families is part of the “dynamic” information, which is usually not available with different governments. The data on child labour is available on the National Crime Investigation Bureau (NCIB) website, the minister said in Parliament today.

Yadav said the National Child Labour Project (NCLP) has been transferred to the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan. The Platform for Effective Enforcement for No Child Labour (PENCIL) portal has been created by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, which is probing over 3,000 complaints of child labour in the last two years. Issues related to education of child labourers will be taken care by the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan.

Manickam Tagore, Congress MP from Virudhnagar in Tamil Nadu, raised the question of unavailability of the data on child labour in Parliament today. “For child labour, if the government doesn’t have data, that is unfortunate.”

Tagore alleged that the government has not released funds for Tamil Nadu under the NCLP scheme from 2016. Under the flagship National Child Labour project in Tamil Nadu, there are nearly 4,314 children, rescued from labour, who studying in schools in districts including Virudhnagar, Dharmapuri and Salem. He urged the central government to release the funds as the stipend given to those students is Rs 400 per month.

According to a recent study conducted by the Socio-Economic Development Foundation (SEDF), child labour in Tamil Nadu among vulnerable communities has increased by more than 200% during Covid times.

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