Today, 14 November—Children’s Day in India—offers an occasion to revisit how India’s constitution framers addressed the problem of child labour.
The first historical reference to child labour appears in the Karachi Resolution of 1931, which called for the “prohibition against employment of children of school-going age in factories.”
Fifteen years later, as the Constituent Assembly began drafting the Constitution, a prohibition on child labour emerged in the earliest subcommittee drafts as part of the fundamental rights chapter. At this stage, it was grouped with the prohibition on forced labour—what later became Article 23. The Advisory Committee later separated it into an independent provision, which entered the Draft Constitution of 1948 as Article 18:
- No child below the age of fourteen years shall be employed to work in any factory or mine or engaged in any other hazardous employment.
When the Assembly debated Draft Article 18 on 3 December 1948, discussion was brief. A short debate need not signal indifference; it may simply reflect consensus. Still, issues related to forced labour dominated the Assembly’s attention, leaving child labour comparatively under-examined. Draft Article 18 eventually became Article 24 of the Constitution of India, 1950.
There is another striking feature of the Assembly’s engagement with this provision. Within the fundamental rights chapter, Articles 17 (Abolition of Untouchability) and 23 (Prohibition of Forced Labour) stand out because they include explicit mandates for penal legislation. In both cases, the Constitution requires the state to treat violations as criminal offences.
The debates and texts of Articles 17 and 23 suggest that the Assembly used three criteria to decide whether a fundamental right should carry a penal clause. The right had to be:
- Horizontal (protecting individuals against violations by other individuals);
- Textually specific; and
- Directed at a social practice the Assembly sought to eradicate.
Article 24 meets all three criteria. It is horizontal, precisely worded, and targets a harmful social practice. Yet, unlike Articles 17 and 23, it does not contain a penal provision. Why?
We do not have conclusive answers. Perhaps child labour did not evoke the same moral urgency in the late 1940s as it does today. Equally plausible is that the economic hardship of the era made child labour appear to some members as an unavoidable—if regrettable—necessity.
Whatever the explanation, the Constitution left criminalisation to Parliament. The omission remains a revealing and understudied gap in the Assembly’s treatment of a practice it clearly intended to eliminate.