HYDERABAD (India): Police have rescued hundreds of children working in hazardous industries in a southern Indian city despite laws that ban child labour, an official said on Thursday.

In a series of raids on leather tanning and plastic factories in Hyderabad over the past 10 days, police said they rescued at least 350 children.

Child welfare officials accompanied some of the children on Thursday as they were sent in a special railway car to be reunited with their parents in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states.

Nearly 200 children returned to Bihar earlier in the week, police said.Police arrested five men accused of supplying children to factory owners.

A police official said the children were working long hours in deplorable conditions. “We found the children confined to their work place in inhuman conditions,” said V. Satyanarayana, a top police official in Hyderabad.

“They were forced to work for nearly 12 hours a day without any respite.” “Many of the children were suffering from skin and other diseases as they were forced to work in unhygienic and unventilated dark rooms,” Satyanarayana said.

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2015

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