Tempo Boy

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

 The Bangladesh International Action Group knows of no government agency or voluntary organisation that is in effective touch with these young people. Some interested community education projects like the UCEP (the Under Privileged Children’s Education Programme) and Surovi do provide some teaching programmes for the children of the urban poor. However, it is significant that a recent survey of the 10,000 UCEP students was unable to produce a single tempo boy. Child domestics may be given time off their very long days to get involved with such schemes. The tempo boy is given no such opportunity during his 12 to 15 hour working day. Organisations such as the Bangladesh Law Centre, the Justice and Peace Commission, the Bangladesh Society for the Enforcement of Human Rights and Nijera Kori have organised some outreach, undertaken surveys and limited human rights education programmes amongst working children, especially those in domestic service.

No community organisation, no trade union, no political party and no government agency speaks up for the tempo boys and other children on the streets. No organised help is available to Suzon, Mizan, Zanu and their friends, whose voices and hopes we have heard in this exhibition.

Ex-President Ershad’s much vaunted Pathakali Trust initiative for the street kids in Bangladesh, which followed Bangladesh’s ratification of the convention, in fact did nothing to enable these tough little wage earners to have an education, training, accommodation, protection and the right to their childhood.

UNICEF’s recent pamphlet, ‘Situation of Children and Priorities for Action in Bangladesh – Background for the 1990s’, doesn’t so much as mention the issue of child labour. It will take more than “improved quality and relevance of education to overcome low enrolment” in schools, at least as far as the tempo boys are concerned.




UNICEF calls for a “Task Force to formulate, implement and monitor a national plan for implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child to:
- help in creating awareness and knowledge of the Convention;
- help ensure government policies are consistent with the Convention;
- provided an excellent forum for advocating o behalf of children.”

In Khursheed Ahmed’s ASK report on child labour in Bangladesh ‘Where Children are Adults”, ex-Supreme court Justice K M Subhan argues that: “In the absence of any clear national measure for rapid reduction in poverty or rehabilitation of the increasing numbers of abandoned children, it may be unwise to legislate absolute stoppage of child labour, especially as the government is not in a position to clog the channels of employment without providing alternative sources of family income.”

Rosalin Costa, in the Justice and Peace Commission’s Study ‘Child Labour in Bangladesh’, echoes Justice Subhan’s calls for:
- accurate monitoring and publicity about child labour;
- protective rights against the exploitation of children to be taken up and maintained by social workers, human rights activists, trade unionists and specially trained lawyers supported through test cases;
- the contradictions and anomalies in child labour laws to be sorted out, and extended in the informal employment sector.

BIAG supports the stand taken by child protection movements, like the Defence for Children International, for the abolition of all child labour and particularly its special reference to criminal offences against a child. BIAG wants to see an end to the exploitation of children, such as tempo boys, in their perilous and illegal trade. Certainly there should be urgent action to enforce the laws (listed in the Annexe) that should be protecting these young workers. However, we recognise that child labour is created in poverty. Its eradication depends on ending the destitution that forces these children to become wage earners at 7 and 8 years of age.