Of human bondage: The ban on child labour in India

If you thought the workforce of India will not have children, defined as those under-14, following a ban by the Union Government, you are a dud.

Take a bet: You will definitely see kids serving you in hotels, innocence in the form of domestic helps and of course beggars, which is a multi-crore profession in Mumbai, India’s supposedly richest metro. Beggars earn Rs 180-crore annually in Mumbai, in case you didn't know.

And you may ask why child labour will flourish despite a joke of a ban.

Because there are over 40 million kids who have never seen a school or just couldn’t waste time to mull over elementary education.

Because even dreaming about food, shelter and clothing is a waste of time for them.

Unlike there fortunate peers, these 40 million kids have to earn a living from the streets to feed their families. They are just thrown out to the cruel struggle which some people call life.

A huge majority of these 40 million work in hazardous industries, which is a recipe for disaster considering their lifestyle as well as inhuman labour conditions .

And the people who run this nation of billion people are notorious for the way they handle rehabilitation programmes.

Will the penalty for flouting the law, which is Rs10,000-Rs 20,000 and a 2-3 year jail term be a deterrent? No.

There are rigorous penalties for various acts of omission and commission which are rarely enforced unless there is a political vendetta behind it in our democratic set up.

The hapless kid is not eligible to vote since he is four years younger than what a our lawmakers think would make them a major. Or mature enough to swallow the whims and fancies of our political masters who run the roadshow called democracy.

Democracy in India means politics; rather politicking. Politicking means power. And in this scheme of things, children of poor parents are just pawns who are in the game by default.

They are doomed. At least till they grow up to be in their own worlds, however murky that may be.

Ground realities of the Indian kind: Jet, Sahara, Hutch, Essar & BPL

Deal-making is as shoddy a work in the emerging market of India as its umpteen television sops aired to make prime time television viewing an ordeal.

The country’s largest airline Jet Airways recently announced a hurried deal to take over Air Sahara, a relatively new player.

Its now common knowledge that the massive valuation of Air Sahara by Jet, just to keep at bay potential suitors including Vijay Mallya, the desi version of Sir Richard Branson, was never in sync with the ground realities.

Air Sahara is just a riddle, not an airline in the strictest sense. It also operates flights.

So the Rs 180 crore Jet paid to Sahara is now as good as a needle lost in the namesake desert. Of course legal battles lie ahead, which is the price for shoddy deal making.

Now, another cracker of a deal is falling apart -- Mobile telephone service providing firm Hutchison Essar-BPL merger in Mumbai circle.

The same reasons that prompted Jet to go for a hurried, short-sighted deal with Sahara has been the underlying principle of the Huchison Essar-BPL drama also – insecurity.

Jet wanted to consolidate its decent presence in the booming aviation industry. Hutch wanted to catch up its ever-losing battle with Airtel.

A better way of dealing with these ambitions was to fine tune its existing operations by playing up its strength rather than swallowing a weak peer.

Jet and Hutchison Essar failed to realize this and rushed through fancy deals which ony caught the fancy of the dealers and shakers in the media. They eventually ended up where they started and perhaps lost some futile crores.

Corporate India has to understand that management strategies churned out in business schools are not sacrosanct. Ground realities are. If only Naresh Goel and his battery of advisors knew that.
And this laconic oneliner should suit future Hutch ads: wherever you go, deal-making is not as cool as the green grass, blue skies and the pug.