There was a time when Sivakasi was synonymous with child labour. Till about 20 years ago, the small town in a dry and arid part of Tamil Nadu was seen as the match maker to the nation. It still accounts for a major portion of matchsticks manufactured in the country. Sivakasi entrepreneurs expanded into fireworks as it was a natural diversification.The printing units that were started to make labels for matchboxes have grown into world-class facilities.
Although the once-flourishing match industry provided employment to an area that could not depend on agriculture, the shameful secret was, the success came mainly due to child labour. Environmental issues and health hazards associated with match making and firecrackers were not grabbing media attention. Now the industry is increasingly going in for mechanisation and one cannot spot children rolling matches in small and tiny units. But other problems persist and children are still made to do hazardous jobs.
In the late 1970s, Sivakasi and child labour caught the attention of the country when a bus carrying workers to a match factory got caught in unexpected flash floods and 35 people were drowned, all of them children under 15. Children, in that era, were mostly employed in match factories.
According to a Unicef estimate, out of about 1,05,000 persons employed in match factories in and around Sivakasi, 44,600 were children. In Sivakasi alone, about half of the labour force consisted of children?all really young. In the 1970s, the Match Association of Sivakasi announced that it will not employ children under 10!
Child labour was the product of those times when well-meaning, but misguided policies, were created to provide jobs for the poor. Small and cottage industries were encouraged without much thought about the pathetic employment conditions. In 1978-79, duty on matches were revised in favour of the cottage sector. The cottage sector had an excise advantage over the small sector. The large-scale mechanised sector was outpriced by the tiny units of Sivakasi. If the industry had been mechanised then, almost everybody would have lost their jobs as one machine could have done the job of thousands of manual workers. Most of the workers in the small and tiny factories did not get benefits like PF, gratuity, health insurance and so on. There was no job security. Temporary workers could be laid off at will. The overcrowded factories did not bother about safety precautions and accidents in the fireworks factories were common.
The tiny sector concept led to the encouragement of child labour. A report published in the 1980s points out that children were not only employed because they provided cheap labour. The piece rates prevailing then were the same for men, women and children. The majority of the labourers were piece-rated. Like in most industries with a large number of children, they are hired because they are more nimble with their fingers than adults. The work when manually done is sheer drudgery, with the worker having to go on arranging stick after stick in the frames. In the 1980s, one had to arrange about 50,000 sticks to earn Rs 3. Adults got bored and thus dropped out.
Children were quick and could be bullied by supervisors and were made to work for long hours. The fact that they should get a proper education and lead a normal life was ignored because of the prevailing poverty.
By the early 1990s, the small-scale and the cottage sector were at loggerheads with each other because of the wage differentials. Child labour had still not become a major issue. With an increasing media focus, and international condemnation, mechanisation started creeping in. Both the government and the NGOs stepped in. The government has initiated the National Child Labour Programme. NGOs have set up health care and education projects.
For instance, Sornammal Educational Trust set up by K Pandiarajan, promoter of the recruitment firm Ma Foi Consultants (whose family was in match industry), does a lot of work on developmental activities like setting up self-help groups, community paediatric healthcare projects, providing scholarships to children of the poorest families and mentoring them, setting up various income-generating activities like dairy farming, goat rearing, tailoring, embroidery, segregating yarn from waste cotton, running tea stalls, grocery shops, saree business and so on. ?The focus is on empowering women so that they will make sure that their children get an education,? says Joel SGR Bhose, a senior manager of the trust.
Today, educational institutions have mushroomed in the Virudunagar district, to which Sivakasi belongs. There is a high percentage of children (almost 80-90%) getting through their plus two exams. Colleges and schools have been set up mostly by the private sector, which claims that they will not be doing so if they are hiring children. They declare that child labour has disappeared in Sivakasi.
The reality is slightly different. Children no longer work in match factories. As investment costs are so low, matches are still rolled in people?s homes.
Children returning from schools are put to work. Although fireworks factories say they do not hire children, tragedies still happen. About three years ago, a South Korean documentary highlighting the plight of three children, suffering various injuries because of accidents involving crackers and the ill-effects of the powerful chemicals, received wide attention.
There is no denying that things are improving gradually. No one dares to employ very young children any more. Mechanisation and eradication of child labour have led to other problems. Employment opportunities in the district continue to be limited. Virudunagar district possibly has the largest number of unemployed graduates in the state. The high-tech printing industry does not have sufficient number of jobs for graduates.
Although there are a lot many educational institutions in the district, it lacks professional colleges, like a medical college.
It is going to take a while before problems of places like Sivakasi begin to disappear.
?sushila.ravindranath@expressindia.com