BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | India’s five-year-old policeman — without comment.
At a time when most children prepare to go to school, Saurabh Nagvanshi is off to the office.
Saurabh works at a police station in Raipur, the capital of India’s central state of Chhattisgarh. He is five years old.
He is part of an Indian system that allows a family member to take the post of a government employee who dies while in service.
There is no age limit and many families have no alternative but to send young children to work to make ends meet.
Saurabh has to feed a family of five and so his mother, Ishwari Devi Nagvanshi, holds his hand and takes him the 110km (68 miles) from Bilaspur, where they live, to Raipur.
In this surrogate police job, a child must work one day and go to school the next.
I had no option but to make my child work. It’s not nice. He should be jumping around and playing at his age
At work, the children are asked to do filing and bring tea and water for senior officials.
The children are paid 2,500 rupees ($57) a month.
found by P. McEntee
In the spirit of international child labor laws, I hope dubya has banned all Police imports from India.
What international child labor laws? I don’t see anything wrong with this story. The family is presumably grateful to have that job. With their promotion rates, he could be secretary to the prime minister by the time he’s 25. The $57 a month salary is quite good considering that a good Appleby’s level fine dining would cost about $2. If he hadn’t gotten this job, he would be doing some menial labor somewhere or perhaps selling in the streets. Kids work in the US too. It’s called chores. Randolph Sears was working at about the same age. Even in the US child labor laws only passed after most people stopped sending their kids to work. Much the same is happening in India, where previously all children were sent to work, now a family may send 3 to work and 1 to school. As they get wealthier, this will change.