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Originally Posted by doofus3 if they dont mind working for 16-17 hours a day its bcoz of they have a money problem which cannot be solved |
Sorry to be blunt, but that is prolly one of THE most insensitive statements that I've ever come across !!! The prevalence of such social evils is, more often than not, a direct result of such insensitivity that abounds !!! Who are we to decide if their "money" problem cannot be solved..Have we given them an opportunity to decide..Or should we condemn them in this manner forever !!!
Anyways, to answer the queries on what the NGOs do, I can give u the example of MVF, coz I'd personally seen them working on this and interacted both with the NGO as well as the kids that they've rescued and rehabilitated....MVF picks up such kids and puts them in what they call bridge camps where children below a certain age are taught for close to an year and a half and made to take the seventh standard common examination in AP....Many pass, many fail..Those kids who pass are then transferred and put into regular Govt. schools and the kids who fail, they are made to study and write it again !! MVF then monitors the kids upto their tenth standard... The kids that we had interacted with...well I dont really think i recall even a single child wanting to get back to labour...All of them were pretty kicked up that finally they've also gotten an opportunity to study!!
You can go thro' MVF's site
here
And as for the money-is-not-enough argument, well, its called the Classic Poverty Argument ...I am pasting the relevant response below...You can go thro' the entire set of FAQs
here ....
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Is it not true that poor families need their children’s income in order to survive? What is wrong with this argument?
Ans: This is the classic " Poverty Argument". The answer to this question depends on how you frame it. If the question is, "Is it not true that if a family is extremely poor and is in desperate straits then the parents would need to send their child to work?" Then the answer of course is ‘YES’. However, if the question is "Are all families now sending their children to work so poor that they need their child’s income in order to survive?" the answer is an emphatic ‘NO’. The tragedy of the child labour situation in this country is that it is simply assumed that every labourer is working because it is an issue of survival for the family. This is the most insidious aspect of the Poverty Argument. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The Poverty Argument for all its appearance of being logical is completely flawed. Interestingly enough it is not even easy to prove. If it were true then in every village the poorest should drop out from school first and enter the labour market. However, rural areas are full of examples of children belonging to very poor families who are in school while their relatively better off counterparts are working. A large number of factors that have nothing to do with the economics of the situation, such as tradition, ignorance of parents on account of illiteracy, lack of access to alternatives, insensitive administration and so on govern the decision of the family to send a child to work or to school. The Poverty Argument ignores all these aspects and views every thing as a purely economic decision.
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Cheers