One fine morning, as I absently glanced through the newspaper, I saw Ratan Tata grinning exuberantly as he clinched the deal with an international steel giant, thereby putting his company on the world map. Jostling with his picture for print space was a tiny, ignominous news article about a child labourer who had been rescued in Mumbai. Intrigued, but case hardened, I flipped to the article....This is how it read...
'Zeenat(name changed), a 9 year old girl from Patiala, lost her mother when she was just 5 and since then, has suffered endless torment at the hands of her alcoholic father, abusive employers and an indifferent society. She was sent to work in Mumbai for an affluent family who paid her father Rs.100 a month. For that she was forced to rise before dawn and work till 11pm every day, sleep in the damp bathroom, eat meagre meals and endure the never ending beatings. This, when she should've been in a school or playground, worrying about fairytales and three digit subtractions. The final day came when her mistress beat her so hard with a steel rod that the back of her scalp split open. In this state, Zeenat was left to die on the streets of Mumbai's red light area, before a kind hearted Samaritan rescued her. He was shocked to see passers by just step over the bleeding child, as if she were a piece of filth...'
This story, which has many parallels in our country(atleast 12 million parallels!) nevertheless brought home the fact that despite all our claims to progress and modernization(HUGE mergers, Oscar level movies, booming GDP et al), India treats its children worse than any other country does. So many children here do not know what love, happiness and ambition really mean. They are starved, abused, neglected, dying. And this is the scenario which is supposed to elevate us to the status of a superpower?
For any rational country, it is easy to see that its future rests solely upon the health and well being of its children. In India, numerous child labour bans and efforts by NGOs simply cannot change the grotesque facts; each one of us knows atleast one zeenat and we choose to look away. What sort of progress is this? I find this situation sadly ironic, and it is pitiable that the ones who ave to suffer the outcome happen to be the hapless youngsters who have no power, no weapons to fight against the all encompassing darkness of their lives... megs
2 comments:
well... ur article is pretty darn true but i must say that u got it all wrong... wat ur dealing with here is two different types of progress... one economic(still a falsehood cos india hasn't moved much on the local scene of econs...) and the other is social/human progress... we lack in both. the social development in our country is very poor... if it were to be measured in terms of the number of smiles u receive on the streets then id say we score at the very bottom.... sad condition but there u have it... Indians are a bunch of lazy pig headed "we think we are so smart" discourteous and overly-conformist ppl...
Treat every child as your own, treat every aged being as your parent. . .. these words can't bring any reaction on bearers of deaf ears. India needs something far more dramatic, like rebates (upto 60%) from I-Tax for social service, or something like that.
Post a Comment