With classrooms shut and parents losing their jobs in the pandemic, thousands of families are putting their children to work to get by, undoing decades of progress in curbing child labor and threatening the future of a generation of India’s children. Childline, a nationwide helpline for children in distress, received 192,000 distress calls between March and August, most of them related to cases of child labor. The country has made serious gains in combatting child labor, but more than 10 million Indian children are still in some form of servitude, according to Unicef. In July, India’s Home Ministry redoubled its fight against the resurgence of child labor, issuing guidelines for urgently setting up Anti Human Trafficking Units in every district. Most of India’s elementary and middle schools are still closed because of the pandemic, affecting more than 200 million children.

Source: Dhaka Tribune December 12, 2020 04:07 UTC