It is always possible to provide complicated reasons for why several million children in India continue to work rather than go to school. But the situation can be described quite simply: the people who could have made a difference actually care very little. Making children work in appalling conditions is easy. Besides, given the extreme poverty in the lives of most child labourers, it is even possible to feel virtuous about letting the children have a ‘better’ life through work. This rationale seems to be endorsed by the children themselves, many of whom appear to have a preference for work over going to, and remaining in, school. This last tendency is often perceived by some important adults as a form of active agency in the children, who appear to be taking control of their own lives. But can one talk of choice when the options are so limited? And running away from the rigours of the government homes, where the children are kept after being ‘rescued’ from work, or refusing to go back to their bleakly surviving families, which had forced them to work in the first place — to what extent could these acts represent clearly thought out decisions and choices? And does juvenile agency of this kind absolve the State or civil society of the responsibility to ensure a system within which children make other, better choices — to remain with their families and go to school?

These are questions that need to be asked again in the face of a new revelation: less than three per cent of child labourers have received the education they had been promised by the State almost two decades ago. This is both a failure of policy and its implementation, and a larger phenomenon that exposes some of the shameful perennials of Indian society, where the sentimentalized myth of the child coexists with the brutal exploitation of children. The Centre is tracing the origins of this failure to a fundamentally flawed primary education policy and system. It is quite right in doing so. But it should also not be forgotten that the middle classes are the biggest employers of children, and that agricultural work has not found its way to the list of hazardous occupations for children in the relevant laws. If taking children off work is too simple-minded and drastic, then something more than State-induced “moral outrage” will have to be enacted in the lives of those who think of themselves as rescuing children from poverty by employing them as workers.