CHILD LABOUR IN PAKISTAN

I want to drag your observation to the serious issue of child labour in Pakistan. Child Labor is one of the major social problems faced by Pakistan since time immemorial.

Child labour is equal to inhumanity, and that is the main severe Problem of Pakistan that is increasing day by day. Basically, illiterate parents are the main criminal in this because they force their children to work as labour during childhood in order to earn money and to survive their family. Most of the children work to meet their educational spend or sometimes they are under pressure from their superiors.

It is a great and critical condition of Child labour in Pakistan in all over the country that cannot be neglected. Because of the child labour in Pakistan, our beloved country is facing a lot of poverty in some years, ignorance and illiteracy rate due to which near about 55% of our Pakistanis are educated.

Causes of child labour in Pakistan
There are a lot of reasons for child labour in Pakistan, which explains below:
Poverty
According to The International Labour Organisation (ILO), Poverty is the greatest cause of child labour in Pakistan and other third world countries also. In Pakistan, a middle-class person earns around $6 a day on average. The average Pakistani has to feed nine or ten people with their daily payment.

Lack of education
According to the researcher, the main causes of child labour in Pakistan is the low quality of education. In Pakistan, the literacy rate is very low, so people are not aware of the strength of education and they send their child for work at the schooling age.

Policies to control child labour

There are several laws and policies contain for prohibiting child labour, or regulating the working conditions of the child and adolescent workers. Some of the important policies are:
The Factories Act (1934
The Employment of Children Act (1991)
The Bonded Labour System Abolition Act (1992)
The Punjab Compulsory Education Act (1994)
Child labour in Pakistan still remains one of the major problems. Pakistan has passed rules in an attempt to recover the problem of child labour in Pakistan and indentured servitude, but those laws are universally ignored.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO)

The Internationa Labour Organization (ILO) is a framework of Pakistan that works at Country Programme that is providing technical assistance to the Government of Pakistan, the Workers’ of organizations to progressively eliminate the worst forms of child labour in the rural economy. ILO has helped the Ministry of Education to ensure that national Education Policy 2009 effectively responds to rehabilitate child labourers through the provision of formal and non-formal education.

Pakistan has passed some rules that are limiting child labour in Pakistan but, these rules are totally ignored, and 12 million children, aged four to fifteen, keep that country's factories operating, often working in squalid conditions.

Minimum Work Age in Pakistan

According to the Employment of Children Act 1991, a “child” is categorized as a person below 14 years of age and an “adolescent” is below 18 years of age. The Constitution of Pakistan also regards the minimum work age as 14 years. However, the 18th amendment has actually raised the minimum age up to 16 years without amending the labour laws, this has increased the contradiction.