CHILD LABOUR- THE MOST SORROWFUL TRUTH

Child labour is nothing but modern day slavery.No Nation is free of child labour. Child labour is the most common problem accross the globe. There are around 218 million children trapped in the web of child labour today. One out of every seven children is engaged in child labour and 166 million are below the age of fourteen.
 The worst figures are in Asia and Africa. In Asia India,Bangladesh,Indonasia and Nepal are the nations where child labour is most prevalent. In India children are mostly engaged in brick kilns, bangle and padlock making factories. In the southern part of India thousands of chidren of ages between 4 to 14 are involved with the match boxes and cracker making factories without any safegaurds for fire fighting, for a paltry sum of ten to forty rupees a day. Most of the child labourers in Nepal are working in carpet weaving industries.
 Africa is also no less, hundreds of child labourers in the Democratic Republic of Congo working in copper mines are of the age of 5 or 6 and after toiling hard for the whole day with bare hands and feets they hardly earn a dollar a day. This copper dust destroys their lungs.
Another important fact about child labour which I would like to share is that nearly half of the chocolate consumed in the United States are brought from cocoa farms in Africa where child labour is rampant. More then 1,20,000 children under the age of 18 are participating in armed conflicts in Africa. Another stunning fact is that on an average child soldiers in Africa are recruited at the age of 7 but at times they are also recruited at the age of 5. Military commanders prefer children because they can easily be brainwashed and manipulated.  Girls below the age of 13 are kept as sex slaves.
Child labour also exist in many of the european countries in some or the other form.
The bodies like ILO and UNICEF are striving hard to eradicate this evil but untill and unless the member states cooperate in their true sense this dream may never come true.