14.12.2011 | permalink
[Child labour rules] leave out some of the occupations that are the biggest employers of children: agriculture and fisheries. These have presumably been left out to preclude children from being stopped from working on their own family farms. But increasingly this has meant that child laborers are smuggled across states to work on Bt cotton farms in India’s largest cotton producing states of Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. According to a study by Davuri Venkateswarlu for the International Labour Rights Forum, 29.8% of the workforce in Andhra Pradesh’s cotton fields were under 14 and 70.6% were girls, in 2009-10. In Gujarat, 24.6% of the workforce were under 14 and 62.7% were girls.