<h2> Child Labour in Bangladesh</h2>

 Child labor                         

                                                 

Bangladesh is a very poor country with 55,598 square miles of land and 110 million population. Here density of population is 1700 per square mile and per capita annual income is Tk.2225/-only. It is one of the LDCs of the world. Our country is rich neither in minerals nor in industrious. It is mainly dependent upon agriculture. With the increase of population cultivable lands are being increasingly divided into fragments. So the cultivators are becoming poorer day by day. A large number of people have become landless. They live as day laborers. They find it difficult to maintain their families. So these families have to engage their children in physical labor from a very early age.

   Children from 8 to 12 years of age has to do manual labor. Many of them work as domestic servants and maid-servants. Sometimes they are engaged to work in the fields. They are engaged to take out weeds from corn-fields. Sometimes they are found to graze the cattle. They work in shops, hotels and restaurants. They are seen to break brick and stones. They are also found to carry brick and other building materials from one place to another. Some are found to work as street-hawkers, rickshaw-pullers and car cleaners. They work in small factories. They polish boots, sell ‘chanachur’ ‘badam’ and vegetables. They work as porters. They catch fishes and sell them in the market . In the platforms of big stations, they are found to work as coolies and often they are found to beg. Some of them move as pick-pockets.  

                                                                       Tokai

        Though labor is sacred, child labor is a crime. The people who engage them take full advantage of their minor age and their helplessness. Children engaged as house servants or maid-servant have to work from early morning to late hours at night. They have to work, so to say, fifteen to eighteen hours a day. They are not allowed any reces and recreation. They are always dealt with abuse and reproof. Very often they are punished mercilessly. Some housewives rebuke them, beat them and pull them by the air. The masters and the housewives are very harsh to them. They are not given the same food that the members of the family take. They are often compelled to take rotten and inferior food. In fact, they are not treated as human beings. At the growing age they suffer from malnutrition as they cannot take balanced diet. So their natural growth of health and brain suffer. They grow up simply to become sick and to drag a miserable existence.