NATIONWIDE DEBATE ON VITAL ISSUES OF EDUCATION, BACKGROUND PAPERS

ANNEXE - III

COMPULSORY SCHOOLING

Extract from the book "EDUCATING ALL THE CHILDREN" by Christopher Colclough & Keith M. Lewin

It seems fairly obvious that a government which genuinely intended to provide sufficient school places for all, and that these should be fully utilized, would introduce legislation to make school attendance compulsory for the relevant age-group. Such legislation is widespread around the world, typically stipulating both the minimum duration of school attendance in years, and the ages during which it should occur. Table 7.5 shows that 85 per cent of developing countries have enacted laws which make schooling compulsory, and that on average they require attendance for about eight years, Both the incidence of legislation and the length of attendance required are less in Africa and Asia than in Latin America. The industrialized countries, on the other hand, have regulations making schooling compulsory, the average duration being slightly more than nine years. The question arises, therefore, as to whether there is any relationship between the non-enactment of legislation and the incidence of low enrolment ratios caused by low demand for schooling. If so, the act of legislating could be expected to be a useful response.

        Table 7.5 The incidence of compulsory schooling legislation around the 
        world
        
        
                  No. of         No. of         (2)as %        Average
                  countries      countries      of (1)         duration of
                                 with                          compulsory
                                 compulsory                    schooling
                                 schooling                     (Years)
                                          
                      1              2             3              4
                                          
        Africa         55             44          80.0           7.4
        
        Latin America  44             42          95.4           8.3
        
        Asia           36             29          80.6           7.0
        
        Subtotals
        
        Developing    135            115          85.2           7.6
        Countries
        
        Developed      34             34         100.0           9.4
        countries
                                          
        Source: Calculated from Unesco (1989 : Table 3.1)

This apparently straightforward question is in fact too complicated to answer accurately, given the available evidence. Observed enrolment ratios are the result of the interaction of supply and demand, and as regards the determinants of supply, the state provision of school places may in any case not be independent of the demand for them. What can be said is that a puzzlingly large number of countries with low GERs have laws making primary-school attendance compulsory. For example, there are seventeen countries with primary GERs of less than seventy having such legislation. Sixteen of these are in SSA, and they include five cases where primary enrolments in the late 1980s were equal to less than one-third of the eligible age- group.

In Africa, there is actually some evidence of an inverse relationship between the incidence of compulsory schooling legislation and the value of the GER: for the group of eleven African countries not having such legislation the mean GER for 1986 was 85, whereas for the continent as a whole it was sharply lower, with a value of 74 for the same year.

We should note that in most cases the legislation exempts children from attending it there is no suitable school within reasonable distance of their homes. The question whether or not such regulations ensure attendance where schools exist thus remains open. However, the cases of Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanzania and Zaire are instructive in the context. In those countries all of which have compulsory schooling legislation, the GER fell by between 10 and 50 per cent over the years 1980-6, partly as a result of economic hardships which caused families to withdraw children from school Here, then, the laws were not sufficient to sustain enrolment in the face of falling demand.

Thus, across developing countries, the existence of compulsory schooling regulations often seems to have had little impact upon the proportion of children actually enrolled. Historically, these laws were introduced in most countries in response to international convention and pressure. Often they date back to the years following the Unesco conferences of the 1960s which, as indicated in Chapter 1, adopted targets for universal compulsory primary enrolment in each region of the developing world.. Sometimes, as in India, Taiwan, North Vietnam, and South Korea, the legislation was on the statute books much earlier, although in India it has never actually been enforced. It is now clear that these regulations were often introduced too early to be of much help: where large numbers of school children do not attend school because sufficient places are not available, it is difficult for the law to insist that attendance should be compulsory for those who do not seek it. The evidence from the industrialized countries suggests that compulsory schooling regulations do promote

continued high levels of enrolment once school places for all children are genuinely available. They would thus become important for countries to adopt and enforce as net enrolment ratios move up towards 90. But where the coverage of school systems remains partial, such regulations are probably of little help.

5.2 Mitigating the costs

One of the causes of the concentration of low enrolment ratios amongst the poorest countries is that state expenditures upon schooling cannot completely remove the costs to poor households of their children's attendance. Even if fees are not charged, there are usually the costs of some books to meet, and often there are school uniforms to buy. Moreover, the opportunity costs of school attendance are, in practice, a negative function of household income. It is the poor who depend upon the income from child labour. For the middle classes, by contrast, household incomes often benefit directly from the child-minding role which full-time schooling provides, and indirectly by allowing more of the time of other members of the household to be spent on income-earning tasks. As pointed out in Chapter 2, in order to move gross enrolment ratios up towards 100, it is not only necessary, at given unit cost levels, that public expenditures on education should rise, but it is a requirement that this should also happen within the budgets of private households. By consequence, the poorer are the households concerned, and the higher the direct and indirect costs which they would need to meet, the more likely is it that public measures to increase primary provision would fail to elicit the required enrolment response.

Crucial, therefore, to the success of state policies for UPE and SFA, particularly where (as is usually the case) it is the children of the poorest families who remain out of school, will be the introduction of measures to mitigate the costs of school attendance Methods of community financing at primary level would need to be confined to the wealthier communities and school (with the possible exception, as indicated earlier, of contributions to capital costs via own construction), and all direct costs of attendance, such as tees or charges for books, materials, and other consumables, would need to be reduced and. where possible, removed. In a number of African countries a strong positive enrolment response to the abolition of school fees has already been demonstrated, even in circumstances where such charges were the equivalent of only a few dollars per year. Thus, price and income clasticities of demand for primary schooling are sometimes high. This will need to be both recognized and utilized by strategies for UPE and SFA.

Even so, policies which substantially reduce the direct costs of school attendance may yet prove insufficient to overcome problems of low demand for primary schooling where the opportunity costs of sending a child to school are judged, by its parents, to be high. Unhappily, this happens in a wide variety of countries and circumstances. As household income have fallen in Africa in recent years, the widespread withdrawal of children from school indicated not just an increasing inability by parents to meet the direct costs of schooling, but also an increased dependence by them upon the incomes, however meagre, which their children could earn. More serious, because more long-standing, is the issue of the institutionalisation of child labour which has been tolerated in a significant number of States, particularly those of South Asia and North Africa. In India, as Myron Weiner observes:

Indians of virtually all political persuasions oppose the notion that education should be imposed. The major objection is that poverty forces children to drop out of school to find employment to augment the income of their families. It is an argument widely subscribed to by all political groups ... In the debate over the government's new policy toward child-labour laws, critics were distressed that the government accepted child labour as a 'harsh reality', but virtually no one urged the government to remove children from employment in cottage industries and agriculture by forcing them to go to school, irrespective to their parents' wishes.(Weiner 1991:186)

These circumstances obtain in India owing to the set of interests served by the system of child labour. Poor parents seek the income it provides. Exploiters, and ultimately consumers, profit from the much lower wages commanded by children in comparison with adult labour. The middle classes find it convenient not to disrupt a system which prevents large numbers of those from poorer backgrounds from entering their own ranks. The conspiracy of silence to which this array of interests leads will not be overcome merely by further reductions in the direct costs of schooling. What is required is a change in attitudes within the State, leading to firmer action against child labour and in support of more universal attendance at school.

ANNEXE-IV

"AN OPEN LETTER TO SCINDIA"

Extracts from the article by Mrs. Tavleen Singh Published in THE INDIAN EXPRESS, New Delhi dated 19-2-95

If you have been good enough to occasionally cast- a passing glance over this column you would have noticed that it has never before contained an open letter. I avoid writing them, generally, because they tend to have a preachy, pontificatory quality which I dislike. It is my humble opinion that us hacks are really in no position to give lectures to all and sundry despite the fact that it is almost an occupational hazard in our profession.

You are young, Mr. Scindia and, from all accounts, dynamic enough to do something that could make future generations of Indians remember you with eternal gratitude. And, all you need to do to achieve this recognition is to remember that despite your title being Minister for Human Resource Development you are primarily Minister for education. Culture, sports and all the other things that come under you can only begin to happen if we first concentrate on educating our hopelessly illiterate population.

Technically we now have over 50 per cent literacy (52.1 per cent to be exact). In fact, as you and I know, even this shameful figure is fudged because anyone who can scrawl his name legible on a piece of paper is considered literate in our unlettered land. But, even if we accept 52.1 per cent as accurate it is not something we can consider an achievement, not even when we Compare ourselves to other similarly poor countries. To give you only a few figures that your ministry staff, undoubtedly, have full knowledge of. The literacy rate in Sri Lanka is 89.1 per cent, Myanmar 81.5 per cent.

According to Asia Week's latest list of vital signs, there are only seven countries more illiterate than us, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Bhutan,

Nepal, combodia and Egypt. So when we talk of our "achievements" in the field of education since Independence we are quite clearly using the wrong word, We have achieved little so far that we can be proud of.

Then, ask yourself why India has been left so far behind by countries that were as illiterate as us 40 years ago. You may find that the answer to your question is that these other countries made primary education compulsory whereas we decided to reinvent the educational wheel and experiment with our own ideas. The result is that we have pursued a variety of well-meaning schemes but still have only 52.1 per cent literacy.

We have tried coming up with a series of 'new' education policies, we have urged people to reach one, teach one, we even tried, under that governmental all-rounder, Sam Pitroda, to make literacy a mission. But nothing has worked, except in the closed minds of the bureaucrats who run your Ministry. Can we now try compulsory primary education?

You will say, as your predeccessors have, that there is little that you can do because elementary education is a state subject. This is nonsense, and it it isn't, change the Constitution we have often amended it for lesser reasons. It your ministry came up with a model, a plan to make primary education compulsory and helped the state Governments follow it, you know that they can be made to go along with you. In any case, those that didn't would do so at their own risk because in the near future it will become virtually impossible to get a job with-out basic literacy. Whatever your bureaucrats tell you, I urge you to pay attention to the fact that we are running out of time. Even if you did decide to make primary school compulsory it would take the country at least 10 years to achieve this for even the first couple of classes.

It is a painfully gradual process which will be even more gradual in a country where inefficiency is the norm rather than the exception.

I implore you, nevertheless, to try doing it for a simple reason that basic literacy affects almost everything else in the country. We cannot dream of a successful family planning programme until women become literate enough to understand that they do not have to have babies. We cannot help mothers prevent the needless deaths of their children, from diarrhoea and other childhood diseases, until they are literate enough to read the instructions on the packets of simple medicines, until they are literate enough to know that dirt kills.

I could go on and on. Our so-called opening up of the economy is doomed to fail until we have a literate population. No matter how clever our captains of industry are, how can they increase productivity without literate workers? A figure I saw recently pointed out that Canada, with 28 million people, produces more than we do. Our industrialists also realise that all our dreams to finally make the Indian 'tiger' wake up will come to naught without basic literacy.

We have tried for nearly 50 years to redistribute our wealth so that the poorest of the poor benefit but because we have been unable to make sufficient wealth all we have done is redistribute poverty. But, that is another story, and a very long one.

All you need to concentrate on is making basic literacy a country-wide reality Every other country has achieved this by making primary education compulsory. Please don't let your bureaucrats persuade you that there is another way. We cannot afford any More experiments. It is already too late.

Hoping you will at least consider my humble suggestion,

Yours ever,

ANNEXE - V

COMPULSORY EDUCATION AND CHILD LABOUR

Extract from a presentation made by Prof. Myron Weiner of MIT, USA at Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies on January 8, 1994

Perhaps some of you in this room have had the good fortune to live a normal life. A normal life is one in which there is no tragedy in the family, where the lives of children and adults are not cut short by diseases that can be cured, where younger members of the family outlive their elders, where the ordinary needs of the family are satisfied, where our children go to school and have opportunities to do what they are capable of doing, and where we do not suffer from the violent anger and hostility of others.

The normal life is, of course, a rarity, experienced only by a small portion of the world. The very poor are least likely to have a normal life, but even those who are rich and powerful may be struck by the anger and brutality of others. And so, both layers of society may, for different reasons and under different circumstances, be denied the life of normality.

On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for Jews, the day of atonement when Jews apologise to others for sins of omission and commission, I was touched when the rabbi of the synagogue I attended in the town of Montpelier in the bucolic region of central Vermont reminded our small congregation that we few lived the miracle-the miracle, he repeated-of a normal life.

I am grateful to you for inviting me to deliver this lecture under the auspices of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, named in honour of a man who was unable to complete a normal life and whose family and friends live in the pain of a life cut short, for they too have not lived a normal life. I touch on this painful subject for the purpose of asking you to think about others whose lives are remote from your own, so remote that they could be living in another country in another century, but who also do not live a normal life.

When I worked on my book, The child and the State in India, I visited the two institutions where the children of India's poor spend their daily lives-the school and the work place. The schools were where normal life transpired. Dressed in their school uniforms, slates in hand, children recited their lessons, sang songs more or less in unison, and sometimes paraded before a strange visitor from a far away land. I must be frank

in saying that the teaching was generally unimaginative, the schools I visited had no library accessible to the children (a handful of books often locked in the almirah), teachers, bored with what they did, often showed little interest in their children, and the village schools rarely had play equipment, nor even a ball. And yet for those children who had the good fortune to be there, this was a normal life.

The children I saw in the work place did not live a normal life. In the now infamous town of Sivakasi, children spent their days in small rooms putting sticks into frames, stuffing matches into boxes, and stacking boxes into cartons. In Jaipur they breathed silicon as they did gem polishing, in Lucknow they sat in damp pits working on looms, in Firozabad they carried molten glass from furnaces, in Bangalore they waited on tables and washed dishes in tea stalls, in Ahmedabad they carried heavy loads of bricks on construction sites. In villages outside of Hyderabad I saw children tending cattle, to the uninitiated a picture of tranquil normalcy, only to learn that these children were bonded labourers paying for the debts of their parents.

My intention is not to provide you with what Mahatma Gandhi once called Katherine Mayo's book, "Mother India","a drain inspector's report". I live in a country in which a four year old child was struck down by a stray bullet in our capital city. She did not live a normal life, nor will her parents. Nor can we say of the children in Chicago and Detroit born with AIDS, or brain damaged with heroin acquired through their pregnant mothers, that they live a normal life.

How does a child come to live a normal live? For most of us the answer is simple: we send them to decent schools, feed and dress them well, provide them with playthings, take care of their health. We do what we think is best for our children. But not all parents do what is in the best interests of their children. Heeroin addicted pregnant women are not acting in the interests of their children. Parents who send their children to a match factory are not acting in the interests of their children. Parents who use their children as collateral for loans are not acting in the interests of their children. None of this is malicious behaviour. It is not the intent of parents to do harm to their children, but they often do.

All over the world adults have often justified what later generations regarded as acts of cruelty toward children. Many revolutionaries, for example, have sent children to wage war, arguing that the martyrdom of children should be regarded by parents as noble. girls have had their sexual organs mutilated to dull their sexual senses so as to

prevent promiscuous behaviour after puberty. Girls belonging to higher social classes have had their feet bound to satisfy adult notions of female beauty. Prepuberty children have been bound in marriage to ensure conformity with rules of consanguinity. Girls have been sold into prostitution by their parents. We could go on from one culture to another, from ancient to modern times, to provide example after example of decisions made by parents for their children that most of us would not regard as in the interests of the child.

Of the great ideas that have transformed the world, none is as revolutionary as the idea that children have rights and interests independent of those of their parents. It is an idea that has no single author. It is not written in the French Declaration of Human Rights, nor in the American Declaration of Independence. It is not in the Magna Carta. it is not found in any of the sacred texts, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or sikh. In my research for The Child and the State in India, I found glimmers of the idea in the writings of the early Protestant theologians, in Luther, Knox and Calvin, who insisted that children be taught to read the Bible and thereby have direct access to the word of God, without priests as intermediaries, so they could escape from the sin of birth. To the agnostic an absurd idea, no doubt, but never mind, it was the beginning of the notion that children had rights and parents had obligations.

Search as I can, I have not found the person who invented the idea that if parents failed to fulfill their obligations to children, it was the responsibility, of the state to guarantee the rights of the child. The idea is embodied in a law passed by the Colony of Massachusetts in 1647, which declared that every town had to financially provide for a public school and that all parents must either teach their children to read at home or send them to school, In Sweden, a royal decree in 1723 instructed parents and guardians to "diligently see to it that their children applied themselves to book reading and the study of leassons in the catechism." Failure to do so could lead to fines used for "the instruction of poor children in the parish." Similar laws making education compulsory were put in place in Scotland. Geneva, and Prussia. In a more secular spirit French revolutionaries advocated compulsory state-run schools to inculcate the ideas of equality and liberty and to break the hold the Catholic church had upon the rural poor. By the end of the 18th century a number of European governments insisted that schooling for the children of all social classes be obligatory, independent both of the wishes and the means of parents.

In time this revolutionary idea spread around the world. different cultures and different ideologies provided a different rationale. Adam Smith argued for compulsory education, not for religious salvation, but for creating a civil society in which men and

women were sufficiently well educated to behave rationally and morally so as not to succumb to demagogues. A half century later, John Stuart Mill argued that education was necessary for a child to "perform his part well in life." He wrote that education was necessary for the "members of the community generally who are liable to suffer seriously from the consequences of ignorance and want of education in their fellow citizen." For Mill, education for the poor was essential for self-improvement, social mobility, and citizenship, reflecting his equalitarian and democratic political philosophy.

In time the idea moved from West to East. The Meiji leadership insisted that all Japanese children attend school. "Henceforth, throughout the land," began a famous school regulation of 1872, "without distinctions of class and sex in no village shall there be a house without learning, in no house an ignorant individual. Every guardian, acting in accordance with this, shall bring up his children with tender care, never failing to have them attend school." The Meiji elite believed that compulsory mass education was necessary not only to build a modern country capable of competing with the West but principally as a way of inculcating a national spirit, love and reverence for the emperor, and loyalty to the state. From Japan the idea of state-imposed compulsory education moved to Korea and to Taiwan, both then Japanese colonies. Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries were also proponents of compulsory education. Lenin regarded mass education as essential to create individuals who would not be motivated by the desire for private gain but committed to the collective good. He saw mass education as a means of inculcating loyalty to the party and its socialist ideology. The Soviet Union, and subsequently all the communist states of eastern Europe, china, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Vietnam made education compulsory.

The idea was planted in India in 1882 when several Indian and British officials argued for introducing compulsory education before the Indian Education Commission, but the proposal was never seriously considered. Shortly before World War I, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, then president of the Indian National Congress, took up the issue in the central legislature in New Delhi. He introduced a private bill proposing that local bodies be authorised to introduce compulsory education in their areas. the bill was widely circulated and while it received some support from leaders of the Indian National congress and the Muslim league, a majority of the members of the central legislature, most officials, and respesentatives of the princely states were opposed. The government regarded the proposal as utopian on financial and administrative grounds. In 1918, Vithalbhai Patel introduced a bill in the Bombay legislative council permitting municipal areas of the state to make education compulsory. The bill was passed and thereafter other states under British rule passed similar laws. These laws remain in force today, but It should be noted that all

these laws permit but do not require local authorities to make education compulsory. The various state laws are enabling legislation, modelled after an 1871 act of the British parliament which was superseded a decade later by a parliamentary act requiring local authorities to make education compulsory. But because Indian states do have so-called compulsory education acts, and the Indian constitution, in Article 45, makes compulsory education a matter of national policy, many Indians mistakenly believe that India does have compulsory education laws, only that they are not properly enforced. In contrast with the countries of Europe, and many in Asia, the idea of compulsory education was not firmly planted in India.

Where the idea of compulsory education was firmly planted it is clear that no single motivation led governments to make education compulsory. But we can make three generalisations. The first is that education was made compulsory in many countries before the industrial revolution-when per capita incomes were low, poverty was widespread, and parents would have employed their children had they been permitted to do so. Secondly the introduction of compulsory education was not driven by changes in technology which required more skilled educated workers. More to the point, the removal of children from the labour force enabled industries to employ technologies that required higher skills.

And thirdly, it was theologians, with their vision of God- fearing, law-abiding, moral youth: educators with their vision of schools transmitting the Enlightenment Values of Secularism rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and individualism; and revolutionaries, with their romantic vision of social transformation, who provided the driving force behind the idea of compulsory mass education. Theologies and ideologies were the critical determinants. The contemporary view, put forth by the World Bank, UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, UNFPA, and by economists and demographers that mass education is needed to increase productivity, reduce fertility, and improve public health-all by now well-proven propositions-did not play a role in the early movement by governments to make education compulsory. Let me note that the 17th century law establishing compulsory education in Massachusetts was not called the Human Resource Development Act, but the Old Deluder Satan Act!

Today, most governments agree that children should be removed from the labour force and required to attend school. They believe that employers should not be permitted to employ child labour and that parents, no matter how poor, should not be allowed to keep their children out of school. Modern states regard education as a legal duty, not merely as a right: parents are required to send their children to school, children are required to attend school, and the state is obliged to enforce compulsory education. It

is a view held not only by all developed countries but by the governments of many developing countries as well. In countries of Asia as culturally and politically diverse as Indonesia. Sri Lanka, North and South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, virtually all children attend primary school- invariably with an element of state compulsion.

India is a great exception, though others, especially neighbouring countries of South Asia, have also not made education compulsory or banned child labour. Indian policy makers have argued that the Indian government lacks the financial resources for universal compulsory primary school education and that it lacks the administrative resources to enforce child labour laws. They have also argued that poor families need the labour and income of their children and therefore should not be coerced into sending their children to school. Moreover, they say, children and their parents find the schools irrelevant to meet their needs. Finally, it is argued that small scale industries need low wage child labour to survive, and that export-oriented industries needs child labour to be competitive in world markets.

None of these arguments is persuasive. The arguments against compulsory education and against the elimination of child labour do not stand up either against the international experience nor the evidence from India itself. I propose to review these arguments, but before doing so, I should first like to provide some of the basic facts about India's children.

India has a low school attendance rate. The 1981 census-the last one to give us detailed data on school attendance-reported that 52 of India's 6 to 14 age group were not attending school. Only 40 per cent who entered first grade completed four years of schooling, only 23 per cent reached the eighth standard. 82 million children ages 6 to 14 were not in school. the 1993 UNDP World Development Report notes some improvement for 1991 but still 73 million of India's children were not attending primary or secondary school.

There are two major consequences of this low school participation rate. One is that India has a high and increasing number of illiterates. While the literacy rate has improved the absolute number of illiterates has increased-in this past decade alone from 314 million in 1981 to 335 million in 1991, over two million a year. India remains the largest single producer of the world's illiterates, Female literacy is particularly low, reflecting the low female attendance in primary schools. The 1991 census reported the percentage of adult female literates to the total female population is under 40 per cent in Andhra, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan. In UP only 26 per cent of women are literate.

ANNEXE - VI

Make Education Compulsory

- Interview with Prof. Myron Weiner

PROFESSOR MYRON WEINER is pleased and surprised with the impact his book, "The Child and the State in India; Child Labour and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective" (Oxford University Press), has made in India. It is a work fiercely critical of the Indian Government's unwillingness to make education compulsory and its acceptance of child labour. Since the book was published last year in India, he says, "it has been widely and favourably reviewed there. Daily newspapers, magazines and weeklies have written about it. I have been asked to talk on television and I gather it has even stirred up discussion in the education ministries. It is something I feel deeply about, so it's pleasing to realise it has been taken up as an issue by people within the country."

Weiner, an american professor, is a quiet, charming man with a philanthropic conscience that reveals itself quickly. Opening his hands wide, he talks rapidly, with emotion and despair over the face that half of India's children-some 82 million-receive scant, if any, education; that, because of this, their chances of self-improvement or getting further than their parents have in life are minimal; and that the Indian Government apparently has no intention of doing anything about it. In the 20 years up to 1981, the number of illiterates in India increased by one million and the trend continues. Weiner is distressed, "it is vital, if India is to progress in the world and reduce poverty, that it does not have millions of illiterates," he says.

But why should it concern him? Weiner is a U.S. citizen with a secure job as Ford International Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was recently in Britain, doing a term's lecturing at Oxford University where this interview took place. The answer Weiner said, gazing out over the camp green countryside bathed by a pale winter sun and at the historic grey stone buildings of the town, is simple. He has a passion for India, has been visiting and working there for the past 40 years, intends to do so again, and feels a deep involvement with its fate and fortunes. And, as a father and a humanitarian, watching his own children's development through these years, he was struck over and over again by the contrast between the West's concern with a child's right to a protected childhood and with providing education, and the situation in India where children as young as three can be found in the labour force. One estimate puts the number of children employed at 44 million.

Yet, in India, Weiner explained, "For many people there is not a conception of childhood. The notion that there is a stage of life when children are children does exist in the middle classes, but for the ' lower castes' children are a resource who can contribute to the household income, and sometimes they are seen as the bridge between poverty and absolute poverty. Nor is there the belief I fervently hold that the state has an obligation to give children education, and that children have an obligation to go to school. Only this can ensure they have the opportunities in life which education brings. Half of India's children are denied that opportunity."

Living and travelling in Asia, Weiner saw small, frail children sitting crouched in damp pits in the ground, weaving carpets from dawn to dusk. He saw children, selected for their thin limbs and nimble movements, working in glass factories where they would carry burning loams of glass stuck to the tips of four-foot-long iron rods without handles, or blow the red-hot glass into shapes. Many meet with accidents with burning glass while, others are exposed daily to dangerous chemicals. Many are the risks to children working in the match and fireworks cottage industries; in pottery factories, the airborne silica dust can cause pulmonary fibrosis. A doctor at the local clinic in Khurja, where pots are made, reports that as many as 30 children report with pulmonary complaints each week.

Many of the children work 15 or more hours a day, frequently in poor lighting; they get little or no time to be outdoors or to play and relax. Nor are many given a proper diet. As a result children, who are favoured over adults because they are compiant and work for just a few rupees, are undersized and have pallid complexions and many chronic ailments. Weiner is angered as he considers the life of these children who have no voice to protest and nobody to stand up for them and says Indian scholars have established that child labourers have stunted growth and are in poor health.

The health of children who work with their parents, as many do, may be better, says Weiner, but those working in the fields are usually busy almost all the time. He recalls stopping one morning, during a countryside drive, to talk to a boy in a field with some cattle. Asked why he was not in school, the boy looking surprised said he had never been to school; he had his work. There was no question in his mind. Weiner observes that he should have an option.

But a 10 year old boy who had been to primary school saw things differently when his father said he must leave and work. He begged to be allowed to stay and threatened

to commit suicide if he was removed from school. He was allowed to take up secondary education and he even persuaded his father to let his brothers stay. All of them went on to university and got white collar jobs.

Weiner acknowledges that such persuasion may not be possible for all children who wish to stay at school, but he was particularly pleased to come across some teenaged girls, Scheduled Castes (once considered "untouchable") all, who did household work, walked to the village to get water and firewood, tended to a cow or two and cooked for the family. Their days were long but nevertheless they attended evening classes to learn to read and write. He adds: :What was so cheering was to hear these girls say they were determined their daughters should be educated. They spoke articulately about it being the way their children could do better than they have."

Worst off are the bonded labourers such as the small boy who was contracted by his parents to work for their neighbours as a way of paying off the money borrowed for a wedding. Because his work only paid the interest and not the debt, he was unlikely to be free to return to school. Weiner recollects: "He was accepting of this though he said he wanted to go back to school. Often, bonded labourers are exploited children at school... so little resources and have no defence."

"Sympathy and compassion alone, even if it became a national sentiment, would riot get children out of the labour force".

Life is even more cruel to children injured at work. Weiner met a boy who had been scalded by boiling water while working in a silk processing factory, and had been sacked because his arm was too badly injured for him to work any more. He was paid no compensation. For some weeks he wandered the streets, begging, but being bright and inventive he found a way to make money by buying rat poison in bulk, dividing it into samll packages and selling them at a profit. But others in similar circumstances end lip as prostitutes, beggars or thieves. Without education they have no skill to help them better themselves.

The plight of child labourers upsets Weiner but he does not believe that sympathy and compassion alone, even if it became a national sentiment, would get them out of the labour force. The only way to do it, he argues, is for the Government to make schooling compulsory and enfore the decision. He says: I do not think abolishing child labour first

is doing it the right way. First you have to make education compulsory. It has to be an obligation of the state to provide education and an obligation for children to attend school. I don't think it is administratively possible to remove children from the labour force and I don't think labour officials can monitor working children. There are too many ways (in which) the labour laws can be evaded. On the other hand, I think compulsory education laws can be implemented. I've looked at this in Taiwan and Mainland China, where they introduced it relatively recently and now the vast majority of children go to school."

It was this recognition which prompted Weiner to write the book and if it (compulsory education) were to happen, he says, laughing suddenly at the simplicity of it, "the problem of child labour would be solved. If the Government enforces attendance at school, the children will be there, not working, and so you get rid of the problem of child labour at the same time that children are being given the benefit of education." But both the, Government and parents argue that it is essential for children to be allowed to work; that it is a necessary evil because families cannot cope without the children's income. That, in turn, means they have a vested interest in producing more children, adding to the country's severe population problem.

The irony, Weiner says, it that the "poverty argument" is wrong. He points to studies by contemporary development theorists which show the connection between mass education and economic growth. Knowledge gives the entire population the capacity to work towards economic growth, and studies show that the returns from primary education are the greatest.

In India, a country which relies greaty on agriculture, this is particularly relevant Weiner suggests. In a survey of devloping countries it was found that the farmers with four or more years of primary education produced 13 per cent more crops than uneducated farmers did and that four years of schooling is a threshold for increasing productivity Each extra year's education raises output by approximately 2 to 3 per cent. Also significant was a research in Hyderabad which showed children from agricultural families who had been to school for five or six years earned higher wages than those agricultural workers who had not. It sounds curious, Weiner agrees, but explains that agricultural wages are paid according to body weight and "children who start work younger are smaller, thinner, and less healthy than those who have been to school." It is information which should be made public, he says with a sudden ferocity.

Another irony, Weiner remarks drily, is that while policymakers shocked him with their lack of apparent concern for mass education, the middle-classes are determined to see their children educated - so much so that the vast majority pay for private education because state education is seen as poor. Their children go on to get the white- collar jobs and so the caste system is perpetuated, Weiner explains. He says: " It would be nice to think that the middle classes, recognising the value of education, would be committed to compulsory education, but the truth is education is largely an instrument for differentiation in India, and there are plenty of people who think education is right for the middle classes but not for the lower classes."

But does it make sense to insist that children spend their time in schools if the quality of education is inadequate? Weiner concedes the problem: "Those responsible for education have put in so little resources they don't feel committed to the notion of it for the lower classes. The schools I visited were often quite unsatisfactory with practically no blackboards, books, chalk and so on. Many have no playgrounds and the curriculum is often unsatisfactory. And teachers frequently do not turn up."

Weiner acknowledges that it is easy for people in affluent, developed countries to talk of the Indian Government's duty to resource its education better; but there is so much poverty and there are so many competing needs. But he points out that a good number of developing countries, including those in Africa with just as serious poverty, have found a way to resource education for all, and he feels sure they will benefit. Weiner observes: There are a number of general benefits for the country as a whole, as well as for individuals who have education. I know of no country that has effectively modernised in this century without a literate population."

One way of at least reducing child labour would be for countries to refuse to import Indian carpets. glassware, pots- or indeed any goods - in the manufacture of which children had been used. The U.S. is currently considering this but Weiner does not see it as ail answer because taking away children's employment does not mean they get to school.

He says:" I am in favour of doing someting to pressure countries not to employ child labour, and I certainly support the efforts the Government makes in India to improve the conditions for working children, but I fear some of the thinking in the U.S. and elsewhere for such legislation is less than pure and I suspect protectionism may have something to do with it."

His book, Weiner admits, has had its share of critics, but far more important, "A number of people seem to have taken up the cause and are carrying on writing and talking about it and that, of course, is the way things can be changed. I am planning now to do research and write an edition for Pakistan because the problem there is very similar," Weiner is confident that if the Central Government were to insist education be made compulsory rather than allow the States to do so, agencies such as the United Nations Children's Fund would provide a great deal of support and would "pay an important role."

But until then, children will go on passing their formative years in dark, airless rooms, crouched and hunched into positions which may distort their bodies for life; they will work hours that make playtime impossible; some will spend their early years inhaling a cocktail of dangerous chemicals, the effects of which may show up years later; others will be maimed in accidents with the red-hot glass or explosive materials used to make matches and fireworks.

That is the side which may attract attention and cause some public anxiety about the fate of children, as happened when a bus carrying load of very young children to a match factory in Sivakasi (Tamil Nadu) overturned, killing all of them. But the daily picture of children toiling is widely accepted and barely noticed. For instance, when Weiner was 'interviewing two researchers from Islamabad University who had collected impressive data on child labour, a small boy walked into the room carrying tea for them. Weiner questioned the child and learnt that he worked as a servant at the University and slept at the back of the building along with other children employed there!

Weiner spreads his hands, inadvertently gesturing towards a group of children who had just finished their afternoon school and were making their way home, backpacks laden with books, through the Oxford streets, and says, "The two academics I was talking to had never stopped to think about the boy as they compiled their statistics on child labour. It is so much a part of the scene it has become invisible. I feel a kind of missionary zeal about the fact that India should give its kids a better chance than that."