Child Labour in Cottonseed Production by Ashok Khandelwal

farms. There could be two different plausible explanations for
this. One, if we believe that there has been a general shortage of
labour this year, then our estimate of total CL is on higher side to
the extent of the one-third of the gap between total wage labour
requirement and total availability of labour. And such shortage
can be attributed to the actions of DRMU. Alternatively, the
reason for the team to find less number of labourers than required
on the select farms could be because the farmers in question made
the child workers run away from the field on getting hint of
arrival of the research team for the survey work. In such case, our
estimates are on lower side to the extent it has impacted the
percentage of CL in total labour negatively. Both are distinct
possibilities. And it is the former aspect of labour shortage that
perhaps explains the reason why no impact of the campaign
against CL reflects in the estimates. The other possible
explanation could be that in the year 2007-08 area under CSP was
relatively more compared to 2006-07 which pushed the demand
and created general scarcity of labour.
The important point here is that the CL use is wide and deep. The
exact estimate may be difficult but certainly the number of CL is
large. It could range anywhere between, say, 60,000 to one lakh.
(c) Feminisation of Labour
Another important aspect of the labour use is the feminisation of
labour force. About 42 percent of the total labour force
constituted of females (Table 2.1 row 12, column 3). Agriculture is
the lowest paid occupation and feminisation of agriculture labour
is an all India phenomenon. The unusual aspect here is that most
of the labour force here is inter-state migrants.
(d) Big Companies and Child Labour
All the farmers reported that they are producing cottonseed on
behalf of one or the other company. Sample farmers are covered
by six companies, namely, Monsanto, Mahyco, Nuziveedu,
Vikram, Rasi and Ajit. The majority (more than 90 percent) of the
sample farmers were working for one of the three companies,
namely, Mahyco or Monsanto or Nuziveedu. Two of these six
companies are Multinational or their partner companies. In our
sample about 62 percent farmers reported to producing for
Multinationals. If we compare our sample with the estimates of
Venkateswarlu for the year 2006-07, then we find that our sample
is overwhelmingly biased towards Multinational. He estimated
total area under Multinational to be around six percent in
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