NEW DELHI: Around Rs 1,20,000 crore is pocketed as profit by employers of child labour annually in India, an amount that is rarely reported as income to the government in order to evade taxes.
This is the startling claim of a preliminary report of a child rights NGO.
According to the NGO's estimates, there are six crore child labourers in the country currently. "This is including the number of children who have dropped out of school or never returned, unlike government estimates which only take into account the number of children who have never gone to school," explained Bhuwan Ribhu, lawyer for the NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan.
As per government estimates, Rs 15 is spent on a child labourer per day while as per the national floor wage, an adult labourer must be paid Rs 115 per day. Assuming these child labourers work for approximately 200 days a year, the total amount comes to Rs 18,000 crores annually.
Source: The Times of India, June 13, 2011
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