Children - Terre des Hommes

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In several districts of Rajasthan, mine workers explained how
they had made financial sacrifices to send their children to
school, but after several years of attending local government
schools, their children were still not able to read or write due
to the poor quality of the education provided and frequent
teacher absences. One village in Jaisalmer district — where
they had now given up on their government school and had
set up their own private school in the village. However, not
all the parents were able to afford to send their children to
this school.
In the mining areas of Bellary district, Karnataka, many
families explained how their economic situation was so
poor that their children are forced to work rather than
attend school. With the decline in mining in the area due
to the economic downturn, some children have started to
leave the mines and go back to school, but many others are
simply forced to look for alternative sources of income for
their family. Some children continue to go to school in the
morning and work in the afternoon, others are only seasonal
workers, whereas a large number continue to work as fulltime
employees. 131 Girls were particularly likely to be out
of school, as parents did not recognise the importance of
educating them when “they will be married in a few years
anyway.” 132 A number of families in Mariyammnahalli village
have lost their farmland to mining. Therefore they have had
to take their children out of school and send them to work.
The Don Bosco Shelter in Hospet explained that parents in
the mining areas are willing to send their children to school,
but their economic situation was so bad that they are forced
to send their children to work in the mines just to fulfill
their basic need for food. 133
Existing legal, policy or programme
interventions in education
rst mooted,
the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education
provides for free and compulsory education for all children
the Act include mandated improvements to the quality of
education provided to all children. Whilst this is a positive
step in the right direction, it remains unclear how this
legislation will be implemented in the mining areas, where
large numbers of children are still forced to work rather
than attend school, and where issues of displacement and
migration impact greatly on the child’s right to education.
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is the government’s flagship
education programme aimed at achieving the
universalisation of elementary education in India. However,
the programme remains flawed in a number of ways. For
example, the scheme’s policy of promoting parallel systems
of education has meant that children across the country
are being denied equal opportunity to a quality education.
Although the scheme has achieved some success in terms
of increasing enrollment figures, retention continues to be
a huge problem, with as many as 31 per cent of children
dropping out before class V. This is particularly true in rural
backward areas where mines and quarries tend to be located.
In addition to this, the programme has failed to yet bring real
improvements to both the facilities and quality of education
provided in the majority of these mining areas.
Whilst the government is still failing to provide quality
education to all children in mining areas, there have been a
number of NGO initiatives aimed at children in these parts
of the country. In Maharasthra, the NGO Santulan has
set up a number of Pashan Shala schools around the stone
quarrying areas, which currently reaches 2,001 children
scattered across five districts in Maharashtra, mostly the
children of stone quarry workers who would otherwise be
working alongside their parents. These schools have now
been recognised by the state government. In Rajasthan, the
organisation MLPC has established a number of crèche
facilities around the mining areas in Jodhpur district to
address the problem of mothers having to take their small
children to work with them. These crèches currently have
Internationally, efforts to reduce child labour and promote
education in mining areas have been limited or at least
not widely documented. In Peru, a number of NGOs, the
ILO, the Government of Peru and the U.S. Department
of Labour joined forces to launch an education project to
combat child labour in mining in the country. This project
aimed to remove children from gold mining and place them
in quality school settings.
131. Interviews with female mineworkers, Bellary district, Karnataka, August 2009.
132. Interviews with mineworkers, Bellary district, Karnataka, June 2009.
133. Interview with director, Don Bosco Shelter, Bellary district, Karnataka, June 2009.
Pamela Baldwin,
134. The impact of education in Peru’s gold mining communities, 26 October 2006, http://ourworld.worldlearning.org/site/
News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8467, uploaded: 5 November 2009.