At an age when children bubble with sheer joy of being alive, millions of small girls struggle to survive the burden of poverty, overwork and ill-health in India. Girls who are forced to labour, endure an entire childhood of extremely poor health with their physical and emotional well-being at a constant three-fold risk due to their living conditions, the work they must do and the fact that they are female. These not-so-unknown, yet always ever-so-shocking facts, are highlighted in this book, essentially a collection of articles by the two journalists who reveal the ground situation for hundred thousands of such girls working in unorganised areas such as ragpicking, in sugarcane fields, rolling agarbattis (incense sticks) or beedis (local cigarettes), bead and carpet factories, homes as domestic workers and others.
The 200-hectare garbage dumping ground in Deonar receives 4,000 tonnes of the 5,500 tonnes of garbage that Mumbai city produces every day, innumerable people, most of them Dalit or Muslim, depend on this dump for survival, collecting from it glass, tin, paper, aluminium and plastic to recycle, says Joshi in the article on ragpickers. A nongovernmental organisation in the area says over half the ragpickers are women and girls who usually work from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., collecting the leftovers of the men ragpickers. Although no one can accurately count how many girls work as ragpickers in the city, they usually belong to two groups: runaways, who have been absorbed into pavement communities in return for labour or for sex, and girls who live with their families in slums or on the pavements.
At times when the grim reality of picking trash everyday becomes unbearable, these girls seek an escape in sniffing an intoxicating photocopying solution or chew tobacco. Health is one of the biggest problems for ragpickers. After ploughing through garbage all day, even a bath is a luxury. Injuries and illness are common. Malnutrition, fever, headaches, cough, scabies, cuts, boils - they suffer everything. And, of course, diarrhoea, asthma and tuberculosis. The government pretends ragpickers do not exist. Ragpicking, clearly a hazardous job, is not mentioned in the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act of 1986.
In such a bleak scenario, education is certainly not a priority. The parents' own illiteracy, fear of approaching schools without birth certificates, the potential costs involved, a reluctance to forgo the child's earnings, are all potential deterrents. Although Article 45 of the Indian Constitution envisages that "the state shall endeavour to provide within a period of 10 years from the commencement of this Constitution, free and compulsory education to all children until they complete the age of 14 years", it remains on paper only since for countless such girls schools is nothing more than a distant dream.
Cited is the instance of 12-year-old Sundar Wagh, who is one of the estimated 40,000 migrant families working in the brick kilns in Thane district of Maharashtra state. Wagh migrates with her family from Biloshi village to work in brick kilns for five months every year. By the time she returns to her native village her name is struck off the school's rolls or she has to repeat the class. Vinita Chauhan, of the same age as Sundar, and her family also migrate during October to May every year from Satkund village in Aurangabad district to one of the 120-odd sugarcane factories in Maharashtra. The factories provide indirect employment to 1,500-2,000 families each to pick, cut, bundle and load the cane. This means that at least 200,000 child migrants like Vinita, a class III dropout have to abandon any notions of a decent education.
Writing on paedophilia, Menon says the beaches of Goa are the perfect theatre for abuse of poor migrant children who come here to earn a living and fall prey to foreigners on the lookout for their secret brand of perversion. A few expensive gifts and a few kind words are enough to lure a child who is terrified as the true nature of the relationship is slowly revealed. Elsewhere, there exists a well-entrenched system which forces young girls into prostitution. The women are silent about their contacts as it is a question of their livelihood. Poverty and desertion by husbands are the two major factors contributing to women entering the prostitution racket.
