Mahaveer Jain: Dreams to Eliminate Child Labour

Dr. Mahaveer Jain

Born in 1951 and brought up at village Bhindar of Udaipur district in Rajasthan, Mahaveer is from a joint family with agricultural background. He did his schooling from the village and graduation from Maharana Bhopal College, University of Udaipur (now known as Mohanlal Sukhadia University). Dr. Mahaveer Jain Joined the then National Labour Institute (now known as V. V. Giri National Labour Institute) in 1976 on a project and later became a Senior Fellow (Director) of the Institute. He served this Institute for 37 years in different capacities. During 70s, he got an opportunity to work with tribals and Scheduled Caste communities of the country and successfully organized rural labour camp for the tribals (Bhils) of Kotra village in Rajasthan. The camp was successful in organizing near about 90,000 tribals as a result of which an organization, ‘Adivasi Ekta avam Vikas Samiti’ was formed in 1978. This organization is still active and working independently in the area. Mahaveer was involved in conducting about 100 rural labour camps in different States of the country. The participants of these camps became community mobilisers, local members of government institutions, MLAs of different States, MPs of the country and some of them have become Ministers also. Mahaveer was appointed as a socio-legal investigating Commissioner by the Hon’ble Supreme Court to enquire into and report on the extent to which the twenty-one directives issued by the Supreme Court had been implemented and to indicate the latest position of working and living conditions of labourers in stone quarries and crushers of stone mines in Faridabad, Haryana. The report titled, ‘Bonded Labour: Justice through Judiciary’ published in 1997 and was released President of India. The report highly appreciated by the Hon’ble Supreme Court and was discussed at the United Nations Human Rights Commission at Geneva. It has been updated with latest information for fulfilling the needs of the scholars in the field of bonded labour and reprinted in 2015 after a huge demand from the readers. Several articles were published in different national newspapers, magazines and journals as also the papers on bonded labour were presented in various national and international seminars.

National and International Interventions on Child Labour

In 1990, a Child Labour Cell (renamed as National Resource Centre on Child Labour) was established at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute and Mahaveer was given the responsibility to coordinate the activities of the Centre. He initiated the process of training, documentation, systematic research, production of documentaries, networking with other Labour Institutes of the States and Publications including street children and child labour series (apart from independent research publications). He became resource person for several organizations working on child labour like ILO, UNICEF, UNDP, World Bank, UNFP and also for all leading NGOs and institutions working on child labour.

One of the significant features was to conduct training of trainers in the field of child labour about which he had got the insight from organizations like Indian Society for Applied Behavioural Science, Delhi and National Training Laboratory for Social Sciences, Bethel, USA. Today, there are many trainers available in the field of child labour, child rights, child marriage, human rights, child prostitution, child trafficking, child begging etc. Trained at V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, they have become nationally and internationally acclaimed trainers. Mahaveer trained more than 2000 trainers in this field and still imparting training as a master trainer. Mahaveer published 39 training manuals for ILO, UNICEF, Government of A.P. and Government of India for different target groups. His books on child labour have been well received and became perspective on child labour in India. He was a part of developing National Child Labour Programme for the country at Prime Minister’s Office and was also part of developing three minutes speech of Prime Minister’s on child labour which honorable Prime Minister read from Red Fort on 15^th August, 1993.

The publication activity was used as a tool of dissemination of information on different aspects of child labour especially in the context of information on the issue of child labour growing exponentially.

Besides collaborating with different social partners, Mahaveer also established networking with NGOs, Academicians, Individual Activists, Employers’ Organizations, Lawyers’ Associations, Association of Pediatricians, State Labour Institutions, Administrative Training Institutes, State Institutes of Rural Development, University Departments, UN and other International Agencies towards acceleration of the process of progressive elimination of child labour. He facilitated in making several mandals of Andhra Pradesh child labour free which is documented in one of my book, “Complete Abolition of Child Labour”.

Apna School—A unique education initiative

Fifteen years back, an educational initiative was made in Greater Noida with a dream to enroll hundred percent children in school from village Rampur Bangar. This dream has been fulfilled with admission of about 800 children in the school. The latest dream is to make every child computer literate. The school, now a model school in the area, is run by local community members of the village since its inception. Mahaveer facilitates them as and when required. Recently, college education has also been started in the same village to make the village much more educated and skilled. School has been visited by visitors from USA, Norway, Germany, England, Russia and other European countries.

HR Process Facilitator

Mahaveer extended his soft skills to the field of bonded labour, women labour, tribal labour and rural labour in the unorganized sector. He trained representatives from various NGOs and other social organizations and has also been applying these skills in the organized sector i.e. government sector, public & private sector, multinational companies, UN agencies, NGOs, universities, management institutions and schools for conducting in-house (with companies like Maruti Suzuki India Limited, Honda Car India Limited) and open training programmes. Mahaveer conducted 800 training programmes in the organized sector with 100 industries and is known for conducting training programmes for workers especially union bodies from several organizations/companies of India since 1976 onwards. Mahaveer  developed modules for train-the-trainer in several organizations and brought out 12 Annual Handbooks on Human Resource Initiatives since 2003. The handbook is still being published by Initiatives & Interventions, an organization registered under the Societies Registration Act.

He has a dream to start management institute at his native town and a university for unfortunate youth to don’t have access to education and also dreams to Make India Child Labour free with 100% enrolment of children in school. His journey is on to achieve the dreams.