BHUBANESWAR: Odisha continues to be one of the states where registration of child labour cases has remained abysmally low since 2018.
The state has had the highest number of violations of Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, and the lowest prosecution and conviction for employing children below 14 years of age. While it is not rare to find a child employed in a household, a tea shop, a construction site or a brick kiln, poor reporting, prosecution and conviction have remained major hindrances in fighting the social malice.
According to the Crime in India report of National Crime Records Bureau, from 2018 to 2022, only six cases were registered under the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986 - one of the lowest in the country. These six cases were filed only in 2021.
However in the same period, 1,992 children were rescued, withdrawn from work and mainstreamed under the Ministry of Labour and Employment’s NCLP scheme, which is a pointer to the negligible reporting.
The ministry was implementing the NCLP scheme for rescue and rehabilitation of child labourers (nine to 14 years age group) and providing them bridge education before mainstreaming them into the formal education system. In 2021, the scheme was subsumed with Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan.
Child rights activist Benudhar Senapati said many child labour cases are limited to general diary entries at police stations and a meagre number of them are converted into FIRs.