Cruelty against domestic helps
In the face of an increase in the incidence of violence against child workers employed in households across the nation, the High Court's ruling declaring such act illegal is a welcome and timely step.
Unquestionably, the set of HC directives to the government that include taking anticipatory measures to stop such employment, legalising non-minor domestic helps as workers, issuing identity cards for such workers from wards, municipalities and union parisads before giving them any job is clearly laudable.
Limiting their daily working time to five hours, forming a national child labour welfare council and so on would go a long way in protecting rights of working children. Now securing compliance would be a big job.
Unfortunately, violence against female and minor workers in the households has remained a permanent scourge despite the existence of laws against repression of women and children and policies to protect domestic workers and eliminate child labour. We hope the government will be activated to implement all the relevant laws and the HC rule to wipe this blot off society.
In May last year, too, the HC had issued a rule on the government to look into such offence on domestic helps. It baffles us why the government itself has been failing to promptly act and address the issue without obliging the highest court to rise to the occasion to protect the relevant constitutional rights of the citizens.
In spite of the HC's commendable activism on this score to yield the desired result, the enforcing organs of the government will have to be more active and efficient. Otherwise, however brilliant and useful our legislation may look on the face of it, it will remain just in the book to the dismay of the victims of the abuses in society.
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