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Further, Indian government may use its existing Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and Mid Day Meal schemes to increase the reach of schools in the rural areas. As we have seen in the above discussion, presence of schools in the vicinity of households helps reduce child labor.

Also the government should take concrete steps towards women empowerment in the country, as it has proved to be a significant factor in restricting child labor. The proposed Women Reservation Bill (India) may go a long way towards women empowerment in the country. Even though poverty alleviation programs have been in place for a long time in our country, they have failed to effectively reduce poverty, as indicated by the presence of child labor in our country. Thus, to ensure that these programs can be effective, policy makers should focus heavily on the implementation part of the schemes, and ensure that various inherent deficiencies in the system are removed.

Conclusions

Child labor is a major problem in developing world today and it needs to be tackled on a priority basis, if we want these countries to progress. There are various determinants of child labor phenomenon as discussed above. Though many of them may seem country specific, but many of them are applicable to a large section of the developing countries. It can be seen from the above discussion that poverty is not the only reason behind child labor. Instead many social factors (viz. gender, number of siblings, size of households, etc.) as well as parental factors play a major role in determining child labor. Hence, to effectively tackle the problem of child labor, we need to consider all these factors simultaneously.

Various studies discussed above have varied global and local applications as they are bound by the constraints of social / country-based settings in which they were conducted. The study conducted by Hazarika and Sarangi on micro-credit has a limitation of only considering the farm-based settings of tobacco plantations. As mentioned in the study, such type of crops have high demands of child labor for plucking and various other activities involved with crop plantations. But this may not be the case with many other crops. Hence, their conclusions about micro-finance's effect on child labor can be applied selectively only.

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Dr. Shreyas Goswami and Vineet Jain are the First Year MBA (BM) Students at XLRI, Jamshedpur. While Shreyas is a Doctor by profession, Vineet is a Civil Engineer from Delhi College of Engineering, Delhi University.