Child Labor and the Urban Third World Toward a New Understanding of the Problem

The Third World cities have been reinvented by the forces of globalization as the destinations of new investments, causing the migration of a teeming million to the major urban centers without any corresponding increase in the creation of new jobs and other basic amenities required for decent living. The problem of child labor has also been exacerbated to an unprecedented level in the urban areas of the Third World countries during this period. Yet the dominant discourses on this problem have come from the Western observers or have some prior Western presence in its understanding of the problem, which defers the Third Worldly understanding of the situation. The author argues that a paradigm shift is needed to incorporate various local discourses in order to effectively address the problem of child labor. Based on a decade of fieldwork among the poor and marginalized population in the city of Kolkata, Child Labor and the Urban Third World will give readers an idea of how this problem has become inextricably bound with various other local conditions, such as the security of tenure in the houses.

Subrata Sankar Bagchi is a reader for the Department of Anthropology in Bangabasi Evening College. His research interests include child labor, urban marginalization, research methodology, and human rights in the Third World. Bagchi is the author of Expanding Horizons of Human Rights and Living on the Margin. He was recently a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Ottawa.