Harmful forms of child labour in India from a time-use perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the prevalence of child labour and long working hours in India using 2019 data, with estimates for boys and girls that deal with age-related child development concerns related to long hours of work. We use international suggestions to define harmful child labour from ILO and UNICEF and a nationally defined time-threshold model in analysing the child-labour phenomenon. Measuring time by the three measurement systems and splitting children by age, gender, and cultural components make harmful forms of labour become clearer. The results show that girls doing agricultural labour and boys working as non-agricultural labourers had the longest average working hours in India. Important social-group differentials emerge. This study implies that policy-makers can be, and need to be, aware of explicit measures of hours worked by children aged six to 17.

KEYWORDS:

• Time-use
• India
• employment
• gender
• child labour
• harmful forms of work
• extreme exploitation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our employer for supporting this research. We also acknowledge the support of the Indian Institute for Dalit Studies, whose teamwork and help has been invaluable during this research. We thank the participants in a conference stream of Development Studies Association conference 2021 for their comments and support.

Data availability statement

Indian Time Use Survey (ITUS) is an open dataset. It is provided through the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation website (https://www.mospi.gov.in/web/mospi/download-tables-data/-/reports/view/templateTwo/24805?q=TBDCAT).

Ethics approval statement

Ethics approval is not required for this study. The authors have complied with ethical standards. Permission to reproduce material from other sources: Not required. We do not reproduce the data.

Notes

1 Our fieldwork in 2015 to 2017 in three states of North India involved visiting four villages in the eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh, including urban Kanpur and three rural areas. We discussed women’s work and their families’ work. We also asked questions of various informants and these observations form part of the basis for this claim.

2 The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2017 to 2018 (NSS 2020b) provides hours worked on the seven days previous to the survey, as did previous Employment and Unemployment Surveys. The PLFS now surveys four times a year to address seasonality issues. However, the PLFS only approaches one respondent for each household.

3 We use ages six to 17 years rather than five to 17 years, as the Indian Time Use Survey 2019 covers children aged six and above.

4 Any work under age 12 is considered child labour regardless of work hours (ILO 2017).

5 Indicator 8.7.1: Proportion and number of children aged five to 17 years engaged in child labour, by sex and age (Available at: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata. Accessed Aug. 11, 2022)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jihye Kim

Jihye Kim is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Statistics, University of Manchester and earned a PhD from the same department in 2021. Her PhD research aims to estimate the prevalence and causes of child labour across India. It offers a new method to obtain accurate estimates of child labour by using a Bayesian hierarchical model.

Wendy Olsen

Wendy Olsen works as a Professor of Socio-Economics in the Department of Social Statistics, University of Manchester. She has taught sociology, development economics, and research methodology. She teaches statistics and PhD research methodology as well as computerised qualitative data analysis, the comparative method, the case-study method, and topics in political economy (e.g. child labour in India).