Bal jagriti is an initiative and brainchild of Ankita Dubey, Ankita Gupta and Jannat Farooqui. We passed out of Tata Institute of Social Sciences last year with a degree in social work and consequently decided to work for children. It was during this process that we realized how distorted the perception of people is towards them. Children form the most invisible section of our population, and are looked upon as “lesser humans” or just “little people”. Everytime we endeavored to take up an initiative, or talk to masses at large about how can we weed out the different problems plaguing children, we always came across a very top down approach. Thus we felt that the right’s based approach, which social activists have adopted recently is limited only to academicians and social workers. The society has not even an iota of a clue about why we use this approach. Therefore to spread awareness about how to work with children and the reasons for the same we started this forum. We have also tried to explain, in simple terms the various laws and policies in place for children, and how they can be used. The idea is to get across the message devoid of jargons which prevent many people from reading on it, or attempting to understand it.
The issue of child labor is a complex one as it overlaps many other issues such as that of education, poverty and income generation. Therefore to bring in a certain level of clarity on the issue and the actions that can be taken by each and every one of you we started this blogging site as our attempt to open a platform for the society to have access to information they want.
Many a times, definitions of child labor are not clear to people. There are also doubts about the rehabilitation of a child who has been rescued. What do you do if you see a child working in a factory? These are some of the confusions which we attempt to address through this forum. We as a group feel very passionately about the cause of the child, and think that in today’s dangerous times, childhood is under threat. It is our responsibility to give every child his/her rights to survival, development, protection and participation ( as enshrined in the united nations convention on the rights of the child), and this is only possible if all of us come together to eradicate the problem.
