The Child Labour Action Network (CLAN) has urged Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to constitute a committee to study linkages between the degrading environment and growing number of working children in order to make child labour rehabilitation programmes more effective.

In a memorandum submitted to Vajpayee on the eve of World Environment Day, CLAN said that degrading environmental conditions in about 115 districts of the country were the cause of child labour in addition to grinding poverty, cultural attitude and parental neglect.

The memorandum points out that 11.2 million and 10.6 million children below the age of 14 are economically active on full-time and part-time basis respectively as per the national population census 1991. Of these, some 40 per cent are pushed into the labour market at a tender age due to environmental factors.

Environmental destruction is also very high in Africa with an estimated 41 per cent of the total number ofchildren aged between 5 and 14 years engaged in economic activity. However, the NGOs and policymakers there have realised the linkages between degrading environment and growing number of working children, it says. But in Asia, particularly India, which has the highest number of child labour force in any country, neglect of this issue continues, says CLAN, a forum of countrywide NGOs.

A new wood substitute

Cola tumblers, tetrapacks, plastic bottles or even agri-waste can all be recycled into eco-friendly wood substitutes like window panes, doors and kitchen cabinets.

But lack of awareness is restricting its use. "Rising cost of solid timber, increasing trend towards minimising the use of scarce wood resources and the need for cost effective and dimensionally stable products has led to fast growth of wood substitute material over the last few years," says Mohini Saxena of Regional Research Laboratory, (CSIR) Bhopal.

Derived from both industrial and agricultural sources, these wood substitutesare not only as good as wood but even better as most of them are water proof besides being fire and termite resistant.

"Polymer composites derived from plastic waste have very good binding properties and when it is combined with reinforcing material like cement, vegetable stalk or glass fibre, it forms an excellent wood substitute, says O P Ratra, technical adviser (Polymers) Reliance Industries.

"The total availability of agro wastes such as bagasse, banana leaves, stalks, saw mill waste, sisal fibre, rice husk and jute stalk is 300 million tonnes in India and our research over the past two-three years has proved that along with suitable binders, these wastes make for excellent, lightweight boards and panels, says H C Matai, deputy chief, Building Material and Technology Promotion Council (BMPTC).

Recently BMPTC has also developed a wood substitute from cotton stalk combined with cement which has been adopted by many eco-friendly industries.

Creating awareness on bioresources

A countrywideJaiv Panchayat (living democracy) movement to educate Indian villagers on the need to protect and maintain registers of their local bio-resources was initiated on June 5, the World Environment Day.The movement, launched at Agasthamuni village in Kedarnath Valley in Uttar Pradesh by a non-government organisation, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) in Dehradun is meant to counter multinational corporationsÕ efforts to gain control over the indigenous resources of developing countries, said RFSTE director Vandana Shiva.

The movement for the protection of right to life and livelihood will involve local women and school children to prepare biodiversity registers and declare their fundamental rights over the local biological resources, Shiva said.

The campaign would spread to Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and western UP. ``In the first phase, a countrywide call for real freedom that allows local people to voice their rights over their resources would be issued on August 15,"she said.