Work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential, their dignity and that precedent to be hazardous to their physical and mental development is child labor. Child labor in Pakistan is spiking and continue to spawn more chaotic circumstances for the small children.
The surveys from various organizations put Pakistan on 3rd ranked country for the extension of child labor. The Humans Rights Commission estimated that more than 10 million children are working in different places including agriculture, industries and so forth; the most deteriorating form is bond labor.
Over 25 percent of Pakistan’s population is living below the poverty line which shows that they are feeble to meet their basic needs and cannot afford two times meal a day. This evidence shows that they lack money to buy food, how can they save money to educate their children? Ultimately, to meet their basic facilities, they are compelled to send their children to work and earn for the family.
Unfortunately, the country has shown very low even negative growth in GDP for the last several years. It has spiked the unemployment rate and resulted increment in child labor. Ifs and buts, low literacy rate another phenomenon which aids to upsurge the child labor. An estimated 22.8 million children aged 5 to 16 are out of school. Currently, Pakistan has the world’s second highest number of out of school children.
It is a very common phenomenon for the country to keep young children especially girls for domestic work. Apart from their miserable conditions, violence against these children is also common. Children belonging to the families where the mother is working can be found to accompany and support their mothers at work and so get pulled into domestic work.
According to the reports, children between 8-15 years were beaten up and blamed for theft by their employers. Sometimes, child domestic laborers are injured and receive cuts or burns during work. Most of the children were living in a suppressed and controlled environment; among those children 2 out of 5 revealed psychological deficiencies.
In recent days, young children are brought from their villages and are forced to beg in streets since handicapped children earn more. It is estimated that handicapped children earn 3 times more than healthy children. Not only this, mothers usually use their young kids to get the attention of people for more money and give them drugs to give a look of serious illness.
There is a proverb “Today’s child is tomorrow’s citizen”. Unfortunately, children in our country lack basic requirements for their survival and are also victims of various abuses. Their troubles are on the upswing still the concerned authorities are showing weakness and allowing them to suffer persistently from social evils.
The suffering of the young generation means the suffering of the nation by and by. If today’s children are illiterate, who will step ahead in future to protect the nation? It becomes the first and foremost responsibility of the government to fully support the children and ensure to facilitate them with enrolling to schools.