Recognizing Tribal Children’s Rights with a Focus on Girls
With worldwide annual spend on digital advertising surpassing $325 billion, it’s no surprise that different approaches to online marketing are becoming available. One of these new approaches is in India, a child has the right to be protected from discrimination, destruction, exploitation, and abuse at home and elsewhere. Children have the right to safeguard from the incidence of abuse, exploitation, violence, negligence, commercial sexual exploitation, trafficking, child labour, child marriage and harmful traditional practices and so on. Every child should enjoy their childhood and children's rights include the right to survive, right to nutrition, right to education, right to recreation, right to protection, right to participation, and adequate opportunities for advancement. Unfortunately, most of these rights are unreachable for the tribal children –especially children of the vulnerable tribal communities (PVTGs) in the country.
According to international law, a ‘child’ means every human being below the age of 18 years. This is a universally accepted definition of a child and comes from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), an international legal instrument accepted and ratified by most countries including India. There are 472 million children in India under the age of 18 years, representing 39% of the country’s total population. A large percentage, 29% of that figure constitutes children between the ages of 0 to 6 years. In addition, 73% of children in India are living in rural and tribal areas, often have limited access to fundamental needs such as nutrition, access to healthcare, education, and protection. The high percentage of children living in tribal areas often forced into child bonded labour system and victims of displacement.
The National Commission for Protection of Children’s Rights (NCPCR), has been working for eliminating child labour, enrolment for school education, protection from exploitation, and opportunity for nutrition. The Commission’s mandate is “to ensure all Laws, Policies, Programmes, and Administrative Mechanisms are in line with the Child Rights perspectives as enshrined in the Constitution of India. Despite this, children in rural and tribal areas continue to face challenges in attaining fundamental needs and rights. Particularly children of vulnerable communities are unable to access nutrition, education, protection and facing forced labour, child marriage, child trafficking, sexual exploitation as well as physical and physiological diseases.
Displacement, discrimination, exploitation, violence, injustice, inequality and poverty are together impacted on a very low human development that targeted the most marginalized groups including tribal and rural population, especially the women and children. Despite India’s significant progress in addressing poverty, accessing education, and digitalization; the results have mainly been uneven and unequal.
Child Labour & Child Bonded Labour
With credible estimates ranging from 60 to 115 million, India has the largest number of working children in the world and among them tribal children are the largest population who are also part of victims of migration and forced labour. Whether they are sweating in the heat of stone quarries, brick-kilns, working in the fields sixteen hours a day, picking rags in city streets, or hidden away as domestic servants, these children endure miserable and difficult lives. They earn little and are abused much. They struggle to make enough to eat and perhaps to help feed their families as well. They cannot go to school; more than half of them will never learn the simplest skills of literacy.
Many of them have been working since the age of four or five, and by the time they reach adulthood they may be irrevocably sick or deformed they will certainly be exhausted, old men and women by the age of forty, likely to be dead by fifty. At least fifteen million of them, however, are working as virtual slaves. These are the bonded child labourers of India. Large number of tribal children are trapped into labour trafficking exploitation. We have identified and rescued child bonded labourers in over 15 types of Industries. Majority of them are belongs to particularly vulnerable tribal groups and are most vulnerable due to inaccessible to welfare schemes and rights-based legislations.
Conclusion:
The Foundation for Sustainable Development (FSD) is a Registered Non-Profit Organization and it is a peoples-based grassroots network that is functioning for economic equality, human dignity, educational development of the indigenous community and establishing social justice with constitutional guidelines. Promotion of economic prosperity, educational equality, employment liberty, enhancing livelihoods, improving living conditions of weaker sections and campaign to stop violence on women, increasing peoples’ participation in conservation of natural resources and combating bonded labour system are the key focus areas of the FSD mission. The FSD is operating in the states of Tamilnadu, Puducherry, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana with the approach of inclusive development with collective action to promote justice and peace. The motto of the FSD organization is “To secure Equality, Liberty and Prosperity” and the mission of the FSD organization is “To empower the vulnerable communities to tackle the root causes of poverty and inequality to achieve prosperity”. We are reaching toward realizing this mission.