How about budgeting for India's children?

HYDERABAD: With an estimated 10 million child workers, India needs to calculate exactly how much they contribute to the economy. Only then can an accurate picture emerge of the budgeting required for children, say child right activists.

"No state government or the centre actually ever wants to calculate how much child labour contributes to the GDP," Satish Chandra, labour commissioner for Andhra Pradesh who has been involved in freeing children from working in various industries for two decades, said in response to a  question at a workshop here.

"You can calculate," he told the media at the workshop titled "Child Labour and Education" sponsored by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPC).

If the minimum wage is Rs.80 or Rs.120 per day, and an adult works for 200 days in a year, that amounts to Rs.16,000 to Rs.24,000 a year. In India, a working child gets Rs.10 or Rs.20 per day, the wage gap is more than Rs.8,000 per child, per year.

"If there are more than 10 million children working, this amounts to a huge sum annually, just in unpaid wages to children across the country," Chandra pointed out.

This also gives activists an idea of how much children contribute to India's economy simply in terms of labour cost reduction!  

"All allocations made by the government in the annual budget presented to the country have a component that is child specific," pointed out Enakshi Ganguli Thukral of the Haq Centre for Child Rights at a workshop in Hyderabad.

However, "we need to check out exactly how much of the allocated fund is actually spent, and in what", she said.

India needs to know how much children's work contributes to the economy. Only if such data is collected every year from the state governments can an accurate nationwide picture of where the resource gap lies emerge, said activists. 

As much as 42 percent of India's 1.12 billion people are children and more than 10 million of its children work, nearly 20 years after India began its National Child Labour Project (1988).

There are 60 million children at below poverty-level (BPL) families today, with 10 million on the streets of India's six metros, an NCPC-circulated document said.

Nearly 40 million children in the age group of 6-14 are out of school, with seven out of every 10 children dropping out of high school.

In 2005, the government promised a child budget, but in presenting the 2007-08 budget, "the finance minister only talked of gender budgeting and forgot all about the budget for children", noted Ganguli Thukral.

As for how much India actually spends on its children, Haq has started doing a 'budget for child' exercise since 2000.

Haq's study has found that today a little over Rs.3 is allocated to children out of every Rs.100 of the union budget's fund. Until 2004, less than this was spent.

The two main government expenditures in this decade are in the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme with 64 percent of the children-specific money available in the education sector.

"Yet the government has reduced its allocation to the SSA from some Rs.51.69 billion to Rs.36.78 billion this year, passing on the burden to the education levy from the citizen," Ganguli Thukral said.

The health sector gets about 20 percent of the money meant for children, but allocation for child health has fallen from the last budget's 0.55 percent to less than 0.48 percent in the 2007-08 budget. Protection programmes get only about one percent of the allocated money.

After years of advocacy, only states such as Assam, Orissa, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are doing a 'budget for child' exercise, allocating 10 to 14 percent of the state budget to children's welfare.