Little Indian directed me to a few excellent sites that detail what India is doing on it’s own to combat child labor and child slavery issues. One of them, a report from the Indian Embassy, begins with this staggering fact:

“ There are more children under the age of fourteen in India than the entire population of the United States. The great challenge of India, as a developing country, is to provide nutrition, education and health care to these children.”

We here in the United States are unfamiliar with numbers that large. What the number indicates is that even if, as the report indicates, only 3.6% of the workforce is under 14, the resulting numbers will still be beyond our ability to comprehend.

The report intro continues with this statement:

“While child labor is a complex problem that is basically rooted in poverty, there is unwavering commitment by the Government and the people of India to combat it. Success can be achieved only through social engineering on a major scale combined with national economic growth. International policies and actions, therefore, must support and not hamper India’s efforts to get rid of child labor.”

I would hope that the words on this blog and the resulting actions would support and not hamper India’s own efforts to combat child labor and child slavery.