The politics of deferral: Denaturalizing the ‘economic value’ of children’s labor in India

Abstract

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Do poor people love their children less? In the case of child laborers, this seemingly straightforward question has generated a range of complex responses. This includes research within the value of children (VOC) framework with its tendency to pathologize parents by framing discussions on children’s labor within household-based economic decision-making. In a stark departure from this framework, this article, focused on India, foregrounds the key role played by post-independence development policies in naturalizing child labor. It offers the ‘politics of deferral’ as an alternate analytic to draw attention to both the incremental as well as the exclusionary logics that underlie the Indian state’s efforts to eradicate child labor through schooling. To what extent does a country like India – where state policies have largely failed to substantively separate children from labor – compel us to realign the current depoliticized, ahistorical and binary (between the economic and the sentimental) framing of children’s value privileged within VOC demographic research?

Keywords

Child labor compulsory schooling development India parental duty postcolonial capitalism

Introduction

In a special issue celebrating 25 years of Viviana Zelizer’s pathbreaking book, Pricing the Priceless Child (1994), US historian Linda Gordon (2012) provocatively enquires, ‘Do poor people love their children less?’ This simple, yet loaded, question addresses a critical, although often misrepresented, dimension of Zelizer’s discussion around the economic versus sentimental value of children. This is namely that Zelizer’s enquiry, which focused on the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, was a critical exploration of the shifting practices that marked the emergence of public normative systems that reflected the construction of collective standards being set in place for the valuation of children’s lives. Through attempting this more systemic enquiry, Zelizer explicitly sought to redirect existing attention garnered by psychological historical accounts, like those of Philippe Aries (1962), that utilized a language of ‘evolving mentalities’ to characterize these changing attitudes towards children. This mentality-based reading, according to Zelizer, tended to not only individualize its assertions, but also paid less attention to how these changing attitudes were embedded, and produced, within particular social relations, cultural attitudes, institutions and economic practices. Her emphasis on the emergence of a new normative system cautioned against the tendency to individualize the move away from an earlier, more instrumental, relationship with children, towards, what appeared to be, a more affective one. It was the emergence of a new normative system that ‘made it hard to justify in the public arena certain explicitly economic contributions by children to enterprises and households’ (Zelizer, 2012: 450).

Despite this critique of ‘evolving mentalities,’ Linda Gordon’s question, ‘Do poor people love their children less?’, endures as a morally shared response to parents who continue to rely on their child’s ‘instrumental value’ or their economic contributions to the household. The immense productivity of the phrase ‘the economically useless but sentimentally priceless child’ is not limited to academic research that historically analyses the rise of this sentimentality and its material, social and psychological effects in Euro-American contexts. Rather, this framing has increasingly come to animate most international development and global humanitarian efforts that target different populations of marginal children in the Global South (Ansell, 2016). In most cases, the success of these projects get framed within the civilizational travel, and tensions, between the objectionable economic valuing of children versus the desirability of a more affective register.

‘Child laborers’ represent a population of children whose ‘value’ remains more coarsely calculated and intimately tied to their economic, rather than affective worth. Through a focus on this figure, this article highlights the contradictions, and limits, that mark the Indian state’s efforts to eradicate child labor. This article specifically discusses the state’s efforts around schooling and highlights how the Indian state produced and positioned these child subjects within a national commonsense that naturalized their need to labor and framed regular schooling, until fairly recently, as an impossibility for these children. The 2009 compulsory education law, which ensures all children between 6 and 14 years of age their right to schooling, has not significantly diminished this earlier imaginary, despite the continuing efforts of several non-profits across the country to address this issue.¹ Not only does the protracted and slow pace of reform obscure the enduring role of caste hierarchies in Indian modernity, including the deep entanglements between postcolonial capitalist accumulation and child labor, but, quite ironically, even more recent legal changes, like the 2016 amendment to the country’s child labor law, tend to reinforce these earlier exclusionary logics through new forms of privatization. In what ways does the Indian state’s framing of child labor, not as a judgment against the poor, but as a scene of distress of existing poverty, conceal postcolonial capitalist development’s role in naturalizing child labor?

The article begins by sharing empirical details on ‘child labor’ in India. It starts by combining statistics and social analysis to unpack the current prevalence of child labor in the country. Following this, the next section engages ‘value of children’ debates and focuses on the absence of a more structural analysis within its shifting framings. The article then moves onto discussing the 2016 amendment to the country’s child labor law to highlight why this amendment’s pragmatic reading of child labor and ‘parental duty,’ seven years after the country passed compulsory education legislation, compels a more critical reading of postcolonial modernity. The ‘politics of deferral’ is the alternate conceptual framing this article offers to analyze postcolonial capitalist development to foreground how a more critical historical and political economy analysis of the exclusionary and compensatory policy imaginary set in place around marginal children might allow us to unpack the state’s role in the naturalization of child labor.

Existing tensions between ‘child labor’ and ‘working children’ are important to spotlight at the start of this discussion. Within this debate, ‘child labor,’ a term most closely associated with the International Labor Organization (ILO), strongly reflects a particular view of childhood as a separate phase of life unburdened by responsibility, and in which learning is for one’s own benefit rather than being tied to economic gains (Bourdillon, 2006). On the other hand, scholars who stress the continuities between stages of childhood and the adult world argue for a less rigid framing that recognizes children’s right to work. The latter have not only relativized the idea of ‘harm’ and interrogated the binary between labor and work, but have most prominently recognized children’s agency as laborers within movements of working children (Bourdillon, 2006; Leibel, 2004). Interested ‘in the areas between the extremes’ of abolishing and condoning child labor (Bourdillon, 2006: 1212), this body of work has offered a more granular disaggregation of children’s work constructing this as containing beneficial influences while not being devoid of harm.² However, what both of these framings tend to neglect in their analysis of this issue is a critical discussion of the intimate entanglements between development policies and the continued role played by child labor in postcolonial capitalist accumulation. However, working children movements, including efforts around the passing of Bolivia’s Law 548, have attended more closely to these structural exclusions while arguing for increased protection for working children (van Daalen and Mabillard, 2019).³ Their fight for social justice and dignity is seldom dominated by a cultural argument but is more explicitly linked to foregrounding their continued exploitation because of lack of regulations, lack of quality schooling and social infrastructure. This article uses the term child workers to acknowledge that not all work that children undertake is harmful and it seeks to strengthen the work being currently undertaken by these movements to hold the state accountable through offering the ‘politics of deferral’ as an important analytic that highlights the role played by postcolonial development and capitalist accumulation in naturalizing children’s labor.

Child labor in India

India has one of the highest concentrations of child laborers in the world (UNESCO and UNICEF, 2015). According to the 2011 census the country has 10.1 million child workers under the age of 14 years. This number increases substantially to 33 million when measured from ages 5 to 18 years (Jacobs and Misra, 2017). Given the limits of what types of work get included in the category itself, there is broad-based agreement that the accurate enumeration of child labor is a fraught exercise. Well-recognized within this fuzziness of numbers is the large variation between states in the country in tackling this issue.⁴ The country’s informal sector makes up about 90% of India’s workforce and half of its GDP, and it is within this less regulated sector where government inspections, legal protections or minimum wage requirements are seldom adhered to, that the exploitation of child laborers endures (Jacobs and Misra, 2017). An analysis of the 2011 census data by the online newspaper LiveMint found that 60% of working children were engaged in agriculture-related activities and that between 2001 and 2011 the percentage engaged in non-farm work doubled to 40% while those in agricultural work fell (LiveMint, 2019).

While poverty is commonly viewed as the primary reason why children work, scholars across various disciplines have complicated this simplistic framing of ‘poverty’ as lack of income by paying greater attention to historical and structural inequality. Sociologists such as Burra (1995) and political scientists such as Weiner (1991) have discussed the widespread prevalence of child labor amongst India’s lower caste populations and argued how this constitutes a deliberate neglect on the part of the country’s more powerful upper castes. This has also been very poignantly disclosed in several Dalit autobiographies, which discuss the everyday cruelties that constitute the gap between the letter of the law and the local working out of deeply embedded hierarchies including within educational institutions (Iliah, 2019; Pawar, 2009; Valmiki, 2008).⁵ Economists have used explicit modeling of India’s varied labor markets to complicate assertions around land ownership and access and children’s labor (Basu et al., 2008). Others have focused on how multinational corporations and investors pressure the government to relax employment restrictions as well as fail to provide adult workers a ‘living wage,’ thereby increasing conditions for family dependence on children’s labor (Leipziger and Sabharwal, 1995). Several labor historians have highlighted how the rule of colonial difference, or the racism of the colonial state, marked the naturalization of children’s labor in colonial India. This critical reading of colonial laws and policies that regulated child labor, including the factory acts in the beginning of the twentieth century, foregrounds the significant role played by the colonial state in naturalizing children’s labor within an emergent modern economic and educational apparatus (Balagopalan, 2014; Kumar, 2019).

More recently, India’s status as a rising economic powerhouse has not significantly diminished its woeful distinction as the country with the highest numbers of child laborers in the world. In fact, the phenomenal growth of the Indian economy from the late 1980s onwards overlaps with India’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1992, following which the country more formally adopted several legal and policy measures to implement children’s rights. Of these, the 2009 Right to Education Act (RTE), which made schooling compulsory from 6 to 14 years of age, was anticipated to play a significant role in reducing child labor.⁶ Despite the phenomenal increase in enrollment figures in primary schools, poor quality schooling, the absence of adequate social welfare measures and lack of regulation have in effect meant that child labor continues to persist. Not only is this inconsistent with what national efforts around compulsory schooling have historically achieved in countries in the modern West, and more recently in East Asia, but it also raises a more fundamental question around the assumed correlation between rapid economic growth, compulsory schooling and the elimination of child labor. When it ratified the UNCRC in 1992, India included a formal reservation around Article 32, which focuses on children’s work. This stated that while the country fully subscribes to ‘the objectives and purposes of the Convention’, certain rights of the child, including their economic, social and cultural rights, ‘can only be progressively implemented . . . subject to the extent of available resources.’ Given India’s rapid economic growth, complying with this reservation should have meant increased budgetary allocations and comprehensive measures to eradicate child labor. Instead, what appears to persist is the country’s growing lack of commitment to tackle this issue, with the ‘extent of available resources’ circulating as an ambiguous and protracted yardstick. Within this complex scenario of skewed resource allocation and the state’s lack of urgency in addressing this issue, it becomes important to interrogate how demographic research that utilizes the framework on the ‘value of children’ constructs the ‘economic value’ of children.

The limits of ‘value of children’ approach

In the field of demography, adoption of the discourse on the ‘value of children’ (VOC) was set in place to comparatively study shifts in the fertility decisions of parents within country-specific contexts. As Trommsdorff and Nuack (2005) discuss, the conceptualization of the VOC approach was tied to the need to develop an instrument for cross-cultural comparisons of the influences that frame parents’ fertility decisions. By constructing the parental imagination as either ‘economic’ or ‘sentimental,’ or mapping shifts in a country’s fertility trajectory within a progressive arc that moves from the ‘economic’ to the ‘affective,’ the VOC approach inadvertently constructed this decision-related arc as that which is marked by differing and individualized logics of parental decision-making. While these individualized logics also took into consideration larger country-based contexts including changes in income, employment, education and the effects of war, to name a few, the absence of a more focused discussion on social policies and structural constraints on parents produced the unintended effect of individualizing, and thereby also pathologizing, parents’ relationship with their children.

The naturalization of this viewpoint in effect conceals structural, as well as culturally and historically sedimented, inequalities that the state’s ‘development’ policies complexly reproduce. Given this special issue’s interest in contesting existing VOC studies through culturally and historically contextualized analyses of childhood in multiple trajectories of modernization projects in Asian societies, this article aims to realign VOC discourses away from its current pathologizing of poor parents. To do this, the following section of the article begins with a critical reading of the 2016 amendment to India’s child labor law, analyzing how this amendment’s deployment of parental ‘duty’ needs to be situated within a longer history of postcolonial policy-making and its underlying capitalist logics. Through devoting various sub-sections to a brief discussion of each of these issues, this article aims to disclose the ambivalence and deep-seated assumptions that mark these policies, and thereby demonstrate how these policies work to further sediment, and naturalize, paid and non-paid family-based labor in the lives of children.

The politics of deferral: Framing the paradox of compulsory schooling and the deregulation of child labor in India

This section of the article discusses the ‘politics of deferral,’ a term I employ to characterize the deliberately slow, hierarchical and constitutively exclusionary logics that mark the Indian state’s development-related efforts to end child labor through schooling. In contrast to VOC’s tendency to rely on an isolated reading of families, the ‘politics of deferral’ attends more closely to the state’s paradoxical role in justifying their slow progress through constructing children’s continued immersion in family-based remunerative and non-remunerative labor as an irrefutable fact. The effort is to problematize the conventional ways in which postcolonial policy-making is usually analyzed as a self-evident, incremental advancement towards achieving desired national goals. Instead, the analytic of the ‘politics of deferral’ underscores the constitutive and continuing role of postcolonial capitalism and its extractive, albeit shifting, logics in determining priorities, ordering resources and differentially valuing the potential ‘economic’ usefulness of marginal children and their communities. As the next section discusses, this ‘politics of deferral’ is starkly evident in the more recent 2016 amendment to the country’s child labor law which effectively deregulates child labor seven years after the country passed a law making elementary education free and compulsory.

The 2016 amendments to the Child Labor Act

At a superficial level, the 2016 Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act appears to be a much needed step towards eradication child labor: it not only prohibits all children under 14 years of age from engaging in labor but also prevents all adolescents under 18 from undertaking labor in ‘hazardous’ occupations. However, a more careful reading discloses that this amendment permits children under 14 to continue laboring in ‘family or family enterprises,’ with the latter defined as any work, profession or business in which a family member works with other persons. This legalization of the bulk of child labor is further augmented by the absence of regulation around how many hours these children should work. Instead, the amendment simply states that children may work ‘after school hours or during vacations’ (Balagopalan, 2018). In addition, the ban on hazardous adolescent work is accompanied by a drastic reduction of what counts as ‘hazardous,’ bringing these down from 83 prohibited activities to only three.⁷ This move essentially nullifies the expanded list of occupations including work in brick kilns, cotton farms, restaurants and domestic work that had been included in this Act over the past several decades having factored in the specific dangers that these trades pose (Ramanathan, 2009).⁸ Given that roughly 80% of child laborers in India are involved in caste-based work (including the persistence of intergenerational debt bondage) in farms, forests and home-based assembly,⁹ and that children are often employed in domestic work, eateries, street vending and roadside garages with the consent of their families, the government’s recent move to legitimize child participation in ‘family enterprises’ and reduce what gets counted as hazardous in effect deregulates the bulk of child labor in the country (Mander, 2016). In addition, this amendment violates the country’s Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) of Children Act of 2000 and also contravenes international conventions to which India is a signatory including the ILO’s Minimum Age Convention and the UNCRC.

This 2016 amendment is in stark contrast to the ‘civilizational’ trajectory of schooling and children’s labor. Within this historical trajectory, it was the increased regulation of labor and schooling that helped achieve children’s permanent separation from wage work in several countries of the world. However, it appears that it is the moral weight of this assumption that the Indian state skillfully leverages when it both reminds parents of their ‘duty’ to keep their children enrolled in school and declares that children under 14 will be working in non-hazardous ‘family enterprises’ only after school and during vacations. It can be legitimately argued that because of the child’s immaturity, parental responsibility or ‘duty’ is a key element to the realization of any legislation around schooling. While this is indeed the case, what this article is disputing is not the invocation of parental duty per se but more its being mobilized at this particular juncture to legitimize the state’s deregulatory moves around child labor.

Realigning ‘parental duty’

This invocation of parental ‘duty’ skillfully elides two critical issues that frame the working out of children’s right to education in the Indian context, namely poor quality schooling and the cumulative effects of a ‘politics of deferral.’ Although schooling is now more accessible, researchers have noted the direct correlation between poor quality schooling and the high rates of children being ‘pushed-out’¹⁰ of school (Hanushek et al., 2008; Little and Rolleston, 2014). Moreover, the unwillingness of countries to create equitable state-funded schooling has also produced unregulated, low-cost schools – whose effectiveness remain largely speculative – as a desirable alternative (Ball, 2012). In addition, the privatization that underlies parental ‘duty’ also becomes starkly clear when read in light of the critical role exercised by the state in efforts to democratize modern schooling. Historical research on mass schooling, which usually takes the US and Prussia as two different prototypes, discusses a high level of rationalization and institutionalization of schools.¹¹ These processes of standardization were critical to the production of the increasingly homogeneous organizational form of the school although the motivations for mass schooling were varied. In the US, mass schooling was for ‘creating societal members’ and involved voluntary organizations including the church in linking individuals to a shared ‘civic culture.’ In Denmark and Prussia, on the other hand, this was more centrally tied to state efforts and the promulgation of national laws that aimed at producing ‘members of the nation-state’ (Boli et al., 1985). The divergence between the earlier focus on standardization and institutionalization and present global efforts around basic education is that school ‘quality’ is marked by the steady decline in the state’s role in institutionalizing and regulating equal education, a marked reduction in social welfare services that enable children to continue with school and the increased privatization of low-cost elementary schools; all of which result in the repeated failure to actualize, within developing country contexts, the axiomatic break from child labor that schooling has historically helped set in place.¹²

Relatedly, ‘parental duty’ also works to effectively flatten out centuries of state neglect and discrimination of certain populations within the context of nation-states (Balagopalan, 2014; Maithreyi and Sriprakash, 2018). Quite clearly, this solipsistic focus on ‘schooling’ – without the state provisioning an infrastructure of quality schooling and related services – works as that which simultaneously naturalizes as well as privatizes child labor as the problem of the poor. India’s decades of efforts to eradicate child labor, including its reservation to Article 32 of the UNCRC around the ‘progressive implementation’ of children’s rights subject ‘to the extent of available resources,’ is being perniciously recalibrated. Given this, it becomes important to reject the assumed neutrality and objectivity associated with ‘progressive implementation’ and to instead draw linkages between assumptions that underlie policies, the slow pace of reform and the resultant naturalization of child labor.

On the politics of deferral

The ‘politics of deferral’ attends to the ways in which the postcolonial state’s anxieties around industrial development produced marginal children within a compensatory imagination and seldom as full citizens, and maps the continuing traces of this imaginary within contemporary discourses of children’s rights, including compulsory education legislation. It thereby draws attention away from marginal families and towards the state but is less interested in gauging the vagaries of policy implementation. Instead, it works by critically reading existing policies against the grain to uncover how postcolonial states have rationalized the slow pace of social and economic reform through a parallel discourse that naturalizes children’s labor. It borrows from postcolonial and critical race theorists (Harris, 2012) the idea that liberal laws including anti-discrimination laws do not necessarily work to end persistent inequalities and racism but rather paradoxically serve to accommodate and even facilitate this (Harris, 2012; Spivak, 2004). Thus, instead of taking at face value measures by postcolonial states to democratize schooling and set in place new legal guarantees around children’s rights – and viewing this as always already an improvement of what exists – the ‘politics of deferral’ disrupts this linear trajectory. It instead offers an analytic attuned to the past to critically examine the embodied assumptions around marginal populations that underlie liberal policy-setting. The conception of policies as apolitical, technical and the rational working out of developmental priorities has often attributed the continued neglect of Dalit and Adivasi populations to its discriminatory implementation rather than viewing the policies themselves as constituted through an exclusionary politics of deferral. However, a close analysis of policies set in place to address child labor through schooling, the most recent of which is the 2016 amendment, quite starkly demonstrates the intimate entanglements between policy-setting, postcolonial capitalism and the naturalization of child labor. The next section of the article offers a broad tracing of the restrictive and incremental inclusion of child laborers within formal schooling to disclose how certain assumptions regarding children’s remunerative and non-remunerative labor became embedded in these policies.

The embodied logics of post-independence ‘development’

In independent India, the domain of ‘planning’ emerged as the neutral ground of expertise in which this new nation’s developmental agenda was drawn up. The ruling elites exercised control of this emergent domain and set in place policies that prioritized economic development, through the growth of industry, combining this with social welfare measures that targeted marginal populations (Ludden, 2011). Social reform got framed, within postcolonial development, as a product of industrialization and not as its auxiliary. In effect what this meant was that while the significance of undertaking comprehensive measures like free and compulsory schooling was recognized in the new Indian Constitution, it was articulated as an entitlement that could be realized only after certain national industrial and economic milestones had been achieved. Thus, industrialization through planning, or what the political scientist Sudipto Kaviraj (2010) has characterized, using Gramsci, as a ‘passive revolution,’ meant that there was no fundamental social transformation, no destruction of the existing feudal relations, nor drastic shifts within agriculture in the capitalist transition of Indian society. The laboring child in India has to be read against this urgency of industrial growth: not only in terms of the contributions their labor has made to post-independence capitalism but more crucially, how, as part of populations that could not be accommodated within industrial development, social welfare measures for marginal children always worked within compensatory logics and were seldom geared towards their equal participation as full citizens.

Multiple government departments worked with an understanding of children’s lives as complexly interwoven with the economic, social and religious status of their families and communities. In the first decade after independence, the Central Social Welfare Services Department was set up to coordinate the vast network of mainly religious-based charitable organizations offering relief services ranging from creches to food provision.¹³ The earliest age-specific category produced by development policies, namely the ‘pre-school’ child, emerged around the mid-1960s and had less to do with the expansion of primary schooling. Instead, this category reflected the biopolitical convergence of various services targeted at this age group as a result of the growing influence of population-control policies. Though ‘family planning’ policies and their reproductive technologies that were primarily secured through the bodies of women, concerns around the quality of the population led to policy interventions that focused on nutrition, health and childcare within a ‘women and child’ focus (Rajan, 2003; Rao, 2001). As a ‘target’ of these interventions the infantile child now got constructed primarily in terms of their biological immaturity with international organizations, like UNICEF, playing a significant role in redirecting relief programs to set in place a decentralized network of protective health and nutrition programs. By 1966 there were Integrated Child Welfare Projects in place at the local level and this evolved in 1974 into the world’s largest targeted child welfare program, the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) (Lokshin et al., 2005; Saxena and Srivastava, 2009).

However, quite unlike the reconfiguring of modern pauperism in France (Donzelot, 1979) and England (Himmelfarb, 1992) in which the family had served as a purposeful ‘target’ around efforts to recalibrate the poor within an ‘immense enterprise of permanent educability’ (Procacci, 1991: 166) that specifically targeted children, the post-independent Indian state was less interested in undertaking similar efforts. The National Policy for Children in 1974, heavily influenced by the United Nations, acknowledged childhood poverty and expressed a willingness to continue with its biopolitical interventions directed at improving maternal and infant mortality, child nutrition and health.¹⁴ The postcolonial state appeared to view these interventions less as a conduit to reconfigure the realm of the domestic, particularly as linked to new knowledge around appropriate caregiving and schooling for infants, but viewed them more in terms of a compensatory set of measures (Saxena and Srivastava, 2009). As populations who were viewed as outside of the formal economy and its processes of industrialization, the postcolonial state had no mercantilist desire to make every child useful or any efforts to extend the apparatus of formal schooling to discipline these young ones.¹⁵ Instead, national anxieties around the poor were animated by a paradoxical understanding of their ‘backwardness’ as that which stalled the country’s economic progress but which also needed to be accommodated within a more benign register. This effectively produced a hierarchical working out of citizenship that reinforced earlier exclusions within independent India, wherein the bulk of the nation’s children got accommodated within a range of compensatory social welfare policy measures.

Policy analysts usually reduce these complex phenomena to underlying ‘facts’ that simply reflect the gap in resource allocation between policies and their lackluster implementation (Swaminathan and Athreya, 2015). While the use of the word ‘deferral’ appears to indicate a similar logic of discrimination in implementation, the ‘politics of deferral’ attends more squarely to this delay as a formative element of postcolonial policy-making that is intimately entangled in an exclusionary framing of marginal populations. In highlighting the complex processes of debate and erasure that produced India’s postcolonial policies as an ‘objective’ set of ‘neutral’ measures, this analytic builds on work undertaken by several scholars whose research discusses the justificatory logics used to legitimize these exclusions. The most significant of these logics include the immutabile incommensurable difference that certain marginal populations represent; differences which often frame them as being responsible for their impoverished circumstances. This was particularly true of indigenous or Adivasi populations, and as Virginius Xaxa (2015: 394) has discussed:

The condition in which tribes found themselves at Independence was primarily attributed to their social and geographic isolation. . . . The onus of locating the problems of tribals is squarely put on their isolation and economic, social and cultural features of their societies.

In the case of lower caste, or Dalit, populations these justificatory logics were those that failed to acknowledge how planning, as a realm of upper caste expertise, embedded certain practices and values that were a product of a deeply troubled hierarchical arrangement of Indian society (Thorat, 2009). Discussing this particular working out of power, Surinder Jodhka’s (2015: 353) states:

Even though the Indian Constitution provided reservations for the SCs [scheduled castes] and also abolished the practice of untouchability, the mainstream process of development planning until the 1980s had mostly been ‘caste blind.’ Development machinery worked with categories like rich and poor or peasant, farmers and laborers, etc. During the initial decades, caste was rarely treated as a relevant variable in the visualization, designing, or administration of various developmental schemes and programs.

When it came to educating child laborers, the majority of whom were lower caste, this ‘blindness’ took shape through a benign reading of poor families and their continued need of their children’s labor for survival. While at one level the state candidly acknowledged the lack of resources to implement more comprehensive measures to eradicate the national scourge of child labor, they morally justified this gradual pace of reforms through this benign framing. This is evidenced in several policies, a few of which are discussed here. For example, the 1974 National Policy for Children offered a ‘time-bound program consistent with the availability of resources’ to make schooling until 14 years of age free and compulsory while also championing the need for a more practical education suited to their present life worlds (Government of India, 1974). Meanwhile, several state and national reports – drawn up usually after tragic incidents in which child laborers had died in workplace-related accidents – highlighted flagrant violations of existing child labor laws and difficulties in prosecuting offenders. But it was only as late as 1979 that the Gurupadaswamy Committee’s report recommended a uniform law across all sectors in which children were employed, thereby paving the way for more comprehensive legislation (Ramanathan, 2009).

The Child Labor Act 1986, through its banning of various kinds of hazardous employment of children under the age of 14 years, would have technically freed a large population of children to attend school. However, the state’s understanding of these children as a surplus population that the formal economy could not accommodate is reflected in the fact that it instead established a ‘child labor cell’ to provide incentives to voluntary organizations to set up non-formal programs and vocational training. That this deliberate and drastically limited view of these children’s futures was not just an arbitrary oversight on the part of the state was reinforced through its education policy. The 1986 National Policy on Education, in a marked shift from the earlier more woolly rhetoric that kept alive Article 45 (free and compulsory education of all children until the age of 14 years) of the Indian Constitution as a promise that would be fulfilled in time, explicitly recognized that all children could not be formally schooled. It instead launched ‘a large and systemic program of non-formal education’ for ‘school drop-outs, for children from habitations without schools, working children and girls who cannot attend whole-day schools’ (Government of India, 1986: section 5.12). This non-formal education was to provide the equivalent of five years of basic schooling at a time when it was widely recognized that less than half of the country’s children were formally enrolled in schools (Sadgopal, 2006).

Postcolonial capitalism relies on the naturalization of this labor with more than 90% of the country’s economy based on multiple modes of informal labor. Several economists have analyzed the phenomenal expansion of India’s informal economy as essential, and not incidental, to India’s spectacular economic growth (Bhattacharya and Sanyal, 2011; Sanyal, 2007). They argue that as a post-industrial global economy, the Indian economy works through two parallel registers of ‘accumulation’ and ‘need.’ The ‘economy of accumulation’ is an exclusionary apparatus centered on the desire to create surplus wealth for industrial development. Its requirements for an unending supply of land and mineral wealth are met by dispossessing marginal populations in rural and urban areas using colonial laws of ‘eminent domain’ that continually usurp resources. Economic development in India relies on processes of primitive accumulation, not just in its prehistory, but also as a constitutive element of postcolonial capitalism (Bhattacharya and Sanyal, 2011). For the large majority of the population that cannot be accommodated within this accumulation economy, given limited employment in the formal sector, the governmental apparatus of ‘planning’ provides limited economic relief, a subsistence living that supplements their low wages but is never adequate to propel them outside of futures within the growing informal sector. It is this ‘need economy’ that views the marginal child within a compensatory imagination, supplementing their lives with basic needs to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation within a landscape of increased privatization and managerial efficiency.

At one level the 2009 Right to Education Act constructs formal schooling as the ideal antidote to the complex inequalities that child laborers face. While the highly iniquitous and segregated landscape of schools has already been discussed, another aspect of this law is the dehistoricization of past exclusions generated by the new focus on the child’s ‘aspirational’ future. This recalibration of an exclusionary Indian modernity is enabled through two related modalities: first, an aspirational futurity reinforces the idea of ‘merit’ as a neutral basis for distributing resources and opportunity (Iliah, 2019). Second, as discussed earlier, this new ‘opportunity’ that schooling indexes appears to be increasingly delinked from the state’s exclusionary moves and instead frames parents singularly liable for their children’s continued immersion in wage labor and primarily responsible for ensuring the child’s sustained presence in schools. Ironically, existing statistics do not reflect a precise category for this growing population of children who appear to be combining labor with schooling. It either includes them within school ‘enrollment’ figures or they get counted as students who are ‘at risk’ of ‘dropping out.’ Each of these terms discloses a solipsistic focus on the ‘school’ with neither term serving to adequately recognize the continued entrenchment of multiple state-determined factors that contribute to the obduracy of labor in these children’s lives.

Conclusion

In framing of the ‘economic value’ of children within a civilizational category that pathologizes parents, VOC discourses appear to affirm that poor parents love their children less. The ‘politics of deferral,’ on the other hand, offers a radically alternate analytic that discloses the complex entanglements between the naturalization of children’s labor and postcolonial capitalist development. By drawing on several examples from policies, including the recent effort to privatize child labor in the 2016 amendment, this analytic moves away from more conventional critiques of postcolonial development that have focused on the discriminatory implementation of policies. It instead identifies how certain constitutive assumptions around marginal children underlie these policies, the most significant of which is the state’s inability to accommodate these populations within the formal economy. The postcolonial state, instead, appears to attend to these children within a compensatory register of social welfare measures whose biopolitical anxieties are indexed in controlling fertility more than in creating the necessary infrastructure required for the exercise of full citizenship by marginal, and mostly lower caste, children. Zelizer’s research had highlighted the emergence of a new normative system in the move away from an instrumental to a more affective relationship with children. However, in the case of postcolonial India, it appears that the state’s role in collective standard setting was that in which the ‘economic’ and the ‘sentimental’ valuation of children is produced as a parallel set of durable, and affective, assumptions around different populations of children. It is this ever-present past of continuing exclusions that forces us to realign the persistent failure of the state within this longer historical arc of a ‘politics of deferral.’

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sarada Balagopalan

Notes

Author biography

Sarada Balagopalan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University. Her research interests include postcolonial childhoods, child labor, compulsory schooling and gendered ‘post-school futures’. She is the author of Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India (Palgrave, 2014). She presently serves as an editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research and served as an Associate Editor for The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies (2020).

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