Rajasthani Teenager Takes up Grandmother’s Job Under MGNREGA

The Rajasthan state MGNREGA officer has denied reports of children working under the scheme.

Anita, 14, outside her grandmother’s house in Mandwa village in Rajasthan. (Photo: Reuters)

For Anita, a family tragedy meant she had to leave school and go to work, doing an adult job even though she is only 14. Anita is the elder daughter in her family and lives in Rajasthan.

After the sudden death of Anita’s father, her mother left the three children in the care of their grandmother in Mandwa village. Struggling to raise them on a meagre widow’s pension, her grandmother pulled Anita out of school four years ago to do the housework. She then sent Anita to take over her government job on a construction site.

Anita fetches water, cooks and tends to the family’s goats before she sets off to work.

I liked going to school. My best friend still goes to school. But my grandmother can’t work, and there is no one else.

Anita

There are 5.7 million child workers in India aged between five and seventeen, out of 168 million globally, according to the International Labour Organization.

More than half the children work in agriculture, toiling in cotton, sugarcane and rice paddy fields, and over a quarter in manufacturing, embroidering clothes, weaving carpets or making matchsticks and rolling beedi cigarettes. Children also work in restaurants and hotels, and in middle-class homes.

In recent years, another option has opened up for Anita and thousands of children like her: the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) enacted in 2005, it provides 100 days of employment a year to one adult member of every rural household. A third of the jobs are reserved for women.

A child labourer shows his hands smeared with what he says are chemicals as he sits inside a police station in New Delhi after being rescued. (Photo: Reuters)

Empowering Women

The job scheme has been credited with reducing rural poverty, curbing school dropout rates, empowering women and improving the financial inclusion of rural populations.

In many parts of the country, successive years of drought have forced villagers to migrate in search of jobs.

Thanks to MGNREGA, the women sometimes stay behind to earn about Rs 180 per day working on construction sites or on highways. When they too go away, older people take on the job.

Village women work at a dry pond under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) in a village on the outskirts of Kolkata, 11 February 2014. (Photo: Reuters)

Rajasthan has 24 million workers under the MGNREGA scheme, according to official data, and women make up more than 60 percent of the state’s active MGNREGA workforce.

There is no mention of child workers, yet they are far from rare. No one at Anita’s job checks identity cards or questions her age, and there are other children like her, she said.

However, a MGNREGA officer in Rajasthan has denied this and said,

We are very sure there are no minors working. There may be some working in place of their mother or father, but the village officials are responsible for checking the job cards and making sure there are no irregularities.

Sandeep Katra, MGNREGA Officer, Rajasthan

MNREGA workers resting in Dindigul district of Tamil Nadu. (Photo Courtesy: Vivian Fernandes)

Children Engaged in MGNREGA Jobs

Non-profit Save the Children has had some success persuading parents in Dungarpur district that they must educate their children and not send them out to work.

It also works with government officials to stop children from working in MGNREGA jobs in Dungarpur, where the average literacy rate is 58 percent, compared with a national average of 74 percent, according to 2011 data.

There are many children continuing to work at MGNREGA sites despite our efforts. Poverty could be considered as a driver, but there are deep-rooted attitudinal constraints which have aggravated the situation of child labour in Dungarpur.

Harish Chanderiya, Project Coordinator, Save the Children

There are 5.7 million child workers in India aged between five and seventeen. (Photo: iStockphoto)

A Save the Children report this week noted the entrenched exclusion of girls and women in India, starting even before birth with female foeticide, and including child marriage.

In the case of Anita, the non-profit’s efforts include getting more state benefits for her grandmother, so the family is not overly reliant on Anita’s wages, which also help pay for her two younger brothers at a charitable residential school.

Anita herself does not plan to work as a labourer for long.

I’d like to learn how to sew, so I can make clothes and sell them in the village. We have to go into town now to buy clothes. So if I learn to use a sewing machine, I think I can do well.