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A sporting chance...

Some children in Jalandhar spend nine hours a day with a football -- making it, not playing with it.

Constituting a substantial number of the workforce engaged in the production of sports goods in this Punjab city, these young ones contribute one third of the household income, earning between Rs 500 to Rs 700 per month.

Their little hands give shape to a wide range of items ranging from shuttlecocks, gloves, leg guards, hockey sticks, cricket bats and balls to carrom and chess boards and fishing equipment.

These are then sold both in India and abroad.

However, these children live in abject poverty and rarely if ever get to avail the opportunity for education.

A survey undertaken by the V V Giri National Labour Institute on behalf of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry in Jalandhar and its adjoining villages found that nearly 75 per cent of the schoolgoing children in the area were into football stitching, apart from attending school.

With increasing work pressure, studies invariably get second priority. This has led to a number of dropouts, data suggesting that 90 per cent of the total dropouts become full-time workers.

Sports goods are mostly manufactured in stages at registered factories, tiny unregistered units and homes. It is in the home-based sector that women and children are employed.

The study found that employment of children in this sector was a recent phenomenon. During the mid-seventies, a spurt in demand and technological improvement had simplified stitching techniques, shifting part of the production to homes, and that is when the children stepped in. Except for marginal differences, the pattern of child employment is the same in both the urban and rural areas, with no perceptible gender differences.

The children working in this sector were commonly found to be suffering from headaches, eye problems, joint pains and back aches, arising from the demands of continuous stitching of football leather.

To eliminate child labour, the study has called for economic empowerment of the families by giving them alternative employment opportunities. The creation of a welfare fund locally at the industry level, wherein a certain percentage of gross value of production could be contributed by manufacturers, has also been mooted, as has the setting up of an effective system of credit to eliminate excessive debts of the workers. The setting up of labour cooperatives to undertake home-based production is another suggestion.

The menace of child labour in india has raised an outcry in the West. There is growing consumer resistance there against buying sports goods manufactured by children. A paper titled ''A sporting chance'' by a UK-based non governmental organisation recently gave a graphic account of child exploitation in the sports goods industry.

That prompted this latest study, by FICCI under the ILO-IPEC programme to obtain a headcount and to give socio-economic factors responsible for creating the conditions that perpetuate child labour.

The study was based on a sample of 1,292 households engaged in sports goods production, and covered 144 registered establishments and 16 unregistered units.

The survey began in the last week of march and was concluded in mid-May.

UNI