HYDERABAD: Speakers at a seminar on child rights have called for changing mindset towards children uplift and their education.

According to 20-year-old census, the number of child labour was 3.3 million in Pakistan, but Unicef, ILO and other international organisations put it at 10 million, they said.

The seminar was organised by the Society for Protection of Rights of Child (Sparc) at a local hotel on Tuesday and addressed by Sparc executive director Sadia Hussain, national manager Kashif Bajeer, Zahid Thebo, Dr Ashothama of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Rustam Ali Samejo of the Sindh Education Foundation (SEF), Mustafa Baloch of the Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO), Hyderabad press club president Jai Parkash Moorani, Ambreen, Abid Channa, Anisha Waliullah of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), Samad Soomro of the labour department, Punhoon Bheel and others.

Ms Hussain said that over 150 street children were getting education and technical training, food, clothing etc, in each drop-in centre of Sparc. She said they would not be dislodged for shortage of funds and promised to arrange funds at all cost so that they did not end up back on streets.

She deplored the fact that even middle-class families employed underage children as servants which was tantamount to depriving them of their childhood. She said people needed to understand that a child did not belong to his parents alone but to the nation as a whole.

Kashif Bajeer and Zahid Thebo presented a performance report of Sparc.They lauded efforts of Sparc towards child rights and said that as long as good governance and political will were not ensured, the situation would remain unchanged in this sector. They said that at the official level children were not considered children of the nation.

Rustam Ali Samejo said the SEC had set up 250 schools in collaboration with Sparc and other NGOs where 500,000 children were getting free-of-cost education, clothing and books.

Dr Ashothama called for changing the feudal mindset while dubbing child exploitation and trafficking as evils of feudalism and bad governance. He said the government lacked will and it had even lost seat of human rights in the United Nations.

Mustafa Baloch said that 80 million Pakistanis paid Rs25 on easy load for mobile phones every month and even children paid sales tax on purchase of biscuit, but no one knew where this money was utilised. Still, he said, “we are rated as a poor nation”.

Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2015