“Poverty is no excuse for child labour” 400,000 returned to school India

[Omaha Steve]

Full article: http://www.icftu.org/displaydocument.asp?Index=991224893&Language=EN



ICFTU ONLINE...
Spotlight on Shantha Sinha (India-MV Foundation ) 31/7/2006


“Poverty is no excuse for child labour”

Brussels 31 July 2006 (ICFTU OnLine): The MV Foundation, an Indian NGO, has taken almost 400,000 children out of work and placed them in schools. Community mobilisation, dialogue with teachers and lobbying are the keys to it’s success. Shantha Sinha, the founder of the NGO, tells us about the MV Foundation and its desire to work more closely with trade unions.



How did the MV Foundation come into being?

We started our fight against child labour in 1991. Our foremost concern was to free children from debt bondage and put them into school. We started out in three villages, informing parents about a law prohibiting debt bondage, explaining to them that employers could be punished, and that the advances they had received in the form of a loan could be cancelled, as it is illegal to force a person to work. We approached the village communities. They we’re not easy to convince and said to us that if people refused to repay a debt they would have no source of credit in the future. We explained to them that if everyone got together they could find their own way of generating credit, without having to rely on an outsider.

We also had to convince the families that it is wrong to force a child to work. We set up local volunteer groups, who went from door to door to spread the message. Their parents never went to school, but the people who volunteered had been educated and felt that they had benefited a great deal from it, that it had given them some dignity.