It’s eight in the morning. While children get ready for school, six-year-old Sohail gets ready to toil at a gem polishing workshop, in one of Jaipur’s slums, some where in north India.

By the time children of his age are back from school at midday, Sohail is not even halfway through his rigorous daily routine. He works ten hours each day, from eight to eight.

Sohail does not know how school life would feel like because he has never been inside a classroom. “My father couldn’t send me to school”, he says wonderingly.

Like India, the city of Jaipur has two sides: it has prosperous jewellery and tourist industries, but also sprawling slums and acute poverty. As Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur has seen massive immigration due to recent desertification droughts. These migrants, plus many impoverished others, live with their children in illegal makeshift shacks, tents, or on the street, and are regularly moved on by authorities.

Little Sohail is a gem of a person himself, a fragile three feet and a half who shies away from attention. He does not understand that what he does each day is wrong for children. A World Vision volunteer asks him whether he gets tired. He smiles, looking down at the ground.

“The work is easy,” he says. “I don’t get money but I get free food in the day time.”

It is obvious that Sohail does not have much idea how dangerous his work environment is. He holds out his tender hands for inspection – his fingers have cut marks on them, though not as badly as some of the other working children, the volunteer says.

Sohail’s job is to carefully place each gem on a pencil-like stone and then temper it by holding it in a tin of red burning charcoal. In one working day Sohail burns through at least two to three hundred of these stones.

As the mercury hits 40 degree Celsius inside the small room of six by seven feet, Sohail concentrates on doing his work quickly, along with six other boys. After Sohail, the next youngest is twelve.

It’s a situation that can easily lead to outcries and criticism, but the harsh realities of disadvantaged families like Sohail’s must also be recognised. According to others in Sohail’s slum community, his parents are in debt, and poverty has forced them to put their children in the gem workshop instead of a school. Sohail does in fact get paid - a meager forty rupees (equals to less than a dollar) – with the money going straight to his parents.

The volunteer asks him “What do you want to become when you grow up?” Sohail does not know how to respond. It is too difficult for a child who spends ten hours a day working to find the time to dream.

Some one shouts Sohail’s name from across the road and this mal-nourished six-year-old politely excuses himself from the conversation. Sohail needs to go back to work.

Help on the way

Sohail doesn’t have a dream yet, but his neighbors in Rajiv Nagar slum, Jaipur, are thinking about him. “We will help him”, said Tanzim, member of the local Children’s club initiated by World Vision.

As in the case of most children here, extreme poverty is pushing the parents to engage their own children in work so that the family can survive. Sending their children to school is viewed as a gamble because slum living does not make it easy for students to stay at school. And if they do not complete their studies, then their early years at school are wasted – in which case, the same child can be of more use in polishing gems.

Shakti Children’s club is exploring possibilities to talk to Sohail’s parents and his employers – to allow him to work for lesser hours and also study at the Early Childhood and Care Education Center. This club has already been helping children who are slow at school to catch up, so accommodating another child will not be a problem.

The extensive reality of child labor in India is well recognized. Despite the existence of provisions in the Indian Constitution and in laws prohibiting child labor. child labor is still common, and the industries which employ children make a major contribution to India’s Gross Domestic Product.

World Vision has been working in the area to attempt to rescue children like Sohail. “It is not easy, but we have seen positive results. Children’s working hours have been reduced and that is a good thing”, said Anil, World Vision Programme Manager, Jaipur Area Development Programme.