Lotus Education as a Right Network (LEARN)

India has the highest number of child laborers in the world. According to a 2001 census, 12.6 million Indian children are illegally engaged in hazardous occupations with other estimates placing the number as high as 115 million. Many of these children are forced to work long hours in sweatshops, quarries, and dangerous factories while others work as domestic helpers, urban panhandlers, and agricultural hands. UNICEF cites the cause of this problem as a combination of poverty, discrimination, social exclusion, and poor education—an explanation which is supported by the fact that 90% of these working children are from rural areas.

Our new Lotus Education as a Right Network (LEARN) project builds upon our tremendous success with the Right to Education Task Force (RETF) in 2005-2007. While continuing our legal and advocacy work to ensure 100,000 poor children get free seats in Delhi private schools, we are also applying the lessons learned through RETF to the rural state of Haryana. Currently, we are surveying rural villages, families and schools to better understand the dynamics that keep children engaged in exploitative labor and out of school. We are presently forming partnerships and alliances at the community level while leveraging the law at the structural level to improve the performance of government and education departments. Our work in Haryana will allow us to improve the quality of education in government schools and increase school enrollment and attendance, thereby liberating these children, by the hundreds and thousands, from a life of subsistence labor.

Partner: White Lotus