PESHAWAR: A nongovernmental organisation, Child Right Movement (CRM), has asked the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to enact laws to curb child labour and also conduct a fresh survey to assess the magnitude of the menace in the province.

The demand was made by CRM member Sikandar Alam Khan while addressing a news conference in connection with the International Child Labour Day at Peshawar Press Club on Wednesday.

He informed that Pakistan ranked sixth among the top ten counties where child labour was rampant. He said more than 215 million children were engaged in child labour worldwide.

Mr Alam said approximately 9.86 million children between the ages of 10-19 years were active child labourers in Pakistan. He further added that around 2.58 million of these children were between 10-14 years of age and a bigger number was below 10 years of age.

The CRM official said that under article 25-A of the constitution, the state was obliged to provide free and compulsory education to all children between ages of five to six years. He also demanded that Pakistan should uphold its commitment to ILO convention 1973 that it would legislate to set minimum employment age at 16 years.

Imran Takkar, CRM executive body member, on the occasion, said after the passage of 18th constitutional amendment, the child labour was now provincial subject, so steps needed to be taken for elimination of the menace.

He recalled that the Employment of Children (Amendment) Act, adopted by the Punjab government in May 2011 was much like the Federal Employment of Children Act, 1991, which provided for the minimum employment age to be 14 years.

He said that provinces of Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had failed to enact laws on child labour.

The CRM member demanded that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government conduct a child labour survey to assess the magnitude and scale of child labour of all kinds as such a measure had not been taken for the last 17 years.

Mr Takkar said specialised child labour inspectors should be appointed to monitor underage employment.

Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2014