FAISALABAD, Sept 26: What Eid will bring for 10-year-old Ihsan Ali, a child-labourer, can be anybody’s guess as he continues to fight poverty as the religious festivity draws closer.

Ihsan earns a paltry Rs1,500 a month for his four siblings and the parents who have pinned high hopes on the young bread-winner. Although he is short of resources, he has the will to “conquer poverty which is not less than any Eid for me”.

Interviewed by this correspondent at Faizabad as he was returning home (at Usman Ghani Town) after his 11-hour job at the factory, he initially hesitated to talk and insisted that his owner had asked him not to tell anyone about his working at the factory or else the police would arrest him.

Convinced by a local with whom he had an acquaintance, he dared speak, saying that just a few days before Eid when people were busy in shopping and making other arrangements for celebrating the festivity, “I have been struggling to achieve the target set for me by my mother.

“My mother has been asking me to spare Rs1,000 this year to meet Eid expenditure, but I have no idea how to fulfill her wish. Somehow or the other, I have managed to achieve half of the target, having Rs500 for my mother to give her a surprise on Eid”.

He said his father earned too meager an amount to be able to make both ends meet. ”I have to work really hard; the day seems too long but at every sunset I take home ‘something’ to feed the family”.

Holding his tools and fixing a cutter blade on his ear, the workman told Dawn that he had never been to school and was employed at the factory as soon as he was offered the ‘advantageous’ job. “But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to get education. Every morning when I see children going to school, I feel bad about not being among them”.

He said he wanted to be a highly-qualified officer, but “if wishes were horses, I would be the first one to ride”. Meagre resources forced him to explore the world of work. He quoted his father as saying that “a child of poor parents can be a good mechanic, not a high-ranking officer”.

The child labourer had a clear-cut message for the powers-that-be that “if the government wants us -– the children like me — to go to school instead of work at factories, it must extend financial assistance to encourage us to bid farewell to powerlooms and other such workplaces”.

Young Ihsan was happy for the factory owner had promised a Rs300 raise after Eid.

Child labour has assumed alarming proportions in Faisalabad as hundreds of children are working at various powerloom units to financially support their families. Most of the children are under 10 years of age who have to do hazardous jobs that risk their life and limb despite laws prohibiting child labour.

Faisalabad is known as the textile capital of Pakistan and is home to thousands of powerlooms, most of them are located in Ghulam Muhammadabad. The colony is considered a biggest industrial locality in the country and supporting the textile sector fetching the much-needed foreign exchange.

Kashif also works at the same factory and earns Rs2,000 a month for working 10 hours daily. He says price-hike has been making their life miserable and his parents can’t afford to indulge in luxury on Eid.