Harris, Gardiner
2/25/13
New York Times
World
Children Toil in India’s Mines, Despite Legal Ban
Harris, Gardiner
2/25/13
2/25/13
New York Times
World
Children Toil in India’s Mines, Despite Legal Ban
This article is about how children in India, as young as five years old, are working in mines to earn money to survive. Most of these children are orphans, but some have families they work to feed. There is an estimated amount of 70,000 kids working in about 5,000 mines. Basically, what these kids do each day is go seventy feet down a bamboo staircase to a pit, crawl through a tunnel in mud about two feet high for about a hundred yards, and then start digging coal. They don’t wear hard hats or steel toed boots, and stuff their ears with cloth. A man named Kumar Subba watches over five mines in Meghalaya, in Northeast India. He has about 130 people working for him, says that his mines produce about thirty tons of coal per day!
I think that this isn’t right for kids to be working in dangerous mines everyday, because there is even a law in India saying that all children, ages six through fourteen need to go to school, but it isn’t really enforced. There is about 28 million kids working in India instead! Kids shouldn’t have to do this, because without wearing hard hats or steel toed boots, you’re almost literally lying at death’s door. I think that India is not a very good place, because they don’t enforce their laws, and so many orphans are working there, so they probably don’t have orphanages. They should at least make the mines safer, rather than having children climbing down wobbly staircases that could collapse at any moment, and having them crawl through tunnels only two feet high! That’s really hard and unsafe. These kids working in mines is not a good idea.
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