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UPSC Optional 2025Question 19SociologyIndustrialization and Urbanisation in India150 words

Do you think that law has been able to abolish child labour in India ? Comment. (Answer in 150 words)

Model answer & approach

- Do you think that law has been able to abolish child labour in India ? Comment. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
Law has driven child labour from the factory and the returns, not from the economy that produces it.
Body
1. What the law sets out to do: Article 24 bars under-fourteens from hazardous work; the Right to Education Act makes schooling to fourteen a right; and the Child Labour Act, amended in 2016, prohibits all employment under fourteen.
2. What it has achieved: The Census count of working children aged five to fourteen fell to about ten million by 2011, elementary enrolment is near universal, and children have largely gone from registered factories.
3. Why it persists: The child's earnings are a household's survival margin, and prohibition does not replace them. The 2016 amendment permits children to help in family enterprises, legitimising the home-based, sub-contracted work where child labour now sits. Informality leaves nothing to inspect; demand persists in cottonseed fields, bangles, zari and domestic service.
4. The verdict: Abolished in law, displaced in fact.
Conclusion
Ending it needs household income security and schools worth staying in, not more prohibition.
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