In the last two decades, enormous sums of money, more perhaps than has been earned by all the child workers of South Asia put together in the corresponding period, have been channelled into the enterprise of mitigating and eventually eliminating the practice. After all these years and despite all that money, there is little indication of any progress.
Missionary enthusiasm, moral vehemence and financial commitment have clearly not sufficed, and so, far from eliminating the practice, the number of working children has actually increased. It remains a moot and ultimately unverifiable point whether the rate of growth of child employment has come down or not. The abysmal inadequacy of the statistical record renders that an idle speculation. What matters simply is that the total numbers have increased and continue to increase. Clearly, the sweeping objective of completely eliminating all forms of child labour was based on too many virtuous presumptions, untouched by real circumstances, to ever rise above empty rhetoric.
But this rhetoric at least had the merit of possessing a moral veneer, unlike the general attitude of cynical acceptance of the economic factors animating the demand for and supply of child labour. Too many million childhoods have disappeared through this crack between the gratuitous sermonising of clueless bleeding hearts and the vulgar pragmatism of hard faced utilitarians.
In recent years, a mime realistic perspective that lies somewhere between the normative and pragmatic extremes has emerged. This new realism does recognise the econonic compulsions behind the origin and persistence of the problem and accordingly calibrates its forms, and hence the degrees of permissible tolerance, on a scale that ranges from the benign to the brutal. But this compromise between the moral and the practical extremes has entailed its own set of undesirable consequences.