Child Labour in Indian Sweet Shops

Indian sweet shops are notorious for profiting from child labor which is tantamount to slavery. These shop also profit from illegal retail activities and use small and vulnerable children in the manufacturing process. Children as young as eleven and thirteen toil in these shops for hours on end and suffer from exertion and fatigue. They have no fixed working hours and are constantly threatened with the fear of being fired, are depressed and deprived of education and entertainment.

Indian sweet shops function quietly and illegally as household industries making little children toil for long hours on very low wages before huge cauldrons of burning fat. Many children working in Indian sweet shops remain unpaid or poorly paid, are scolded, ill treated and underfed. Studies of children toiling in Indian sweet shops show that they mainly hail from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Nepal. These children sometimes also double up as domestic help for the owners of the sweet shops and their families.

Most of the children working in this sector are not paid more than 300 to 800 rupees in a month, for more than twelve hours of labor each day - in suffocating rooms which are hot and smoky. The different processes of making Indian sweets also tantamount to hard and relentless labor. A study shows that most of the children working in Indian sweet shops want to quit work and go to school. They also pine to stay with their parents and other family members. The owners of sweet shop discourage their ambitions and shun the attempts of any social activists who try to bring their plight in the lime light.

Sweet shop owners prefer to employ small children due to their vulnerability in terms of wanting remuneration. Also, it is considerably easy to bully and scold a child. They mostly employ minors, and are reluctant to divulge details about these little employers and their working conditions. Besides the official statistics of 11 million child workers in India, thousands working in these sweet shops go unreported, because of the unorganized nature of their labor. The economic boom in India has given a fillip to the profits of sweet shops, ironically worsening the lot of these children. They are forced to work for longer hours at lesser wages to fulfill the demand for the sweets, they help to make.

In a recent raid in Delhi, India’s political capital, many boy child workers were rescued from several sweet shops. Agents had lured them from India’s poorest regions with promises of good wages and decent working conditions. India’s poor children are locked up in hidden floors of garment factories, match stick making huts, carpet making work shops and sweltering sweet shop kitchens to create goods for export. Some of their produce is sold in top shops in the UK and America for huge profits, while they wither in dire poverty and abject deprivation.