Many young girls from the ages of 12 to 15 are employed as nanny’s in India. Even though there is a law in India that makes this ille­gal, a loop­hole in laws makes it impos­si­ble to pros­e­cute, for a sim­i­lar law make the prac­tice legal.

Regard­less of the law loop­hole, its is a cul­tur­ally accepted prac­tice to have young girls employed as nanny’s even though they should be enjoy­ing their own childhood.

From Time Mag­a­zine, writer Nilan­jana Bhowmick intro­duces us to one such nanny.

Asha’s day starts at 8 a.m., when she wakes up and makes break­fast for the fam­ily she lives with as a nanny in Noida, a sub­urb of New Delhi. She takes the kids down to play, feeds them, bathes them and puts up with their tantrums. Asha is around 14 years old — a few years older than the chil­dren she minds. Neha, 12, works as a daily maid for a fam­ily in New Delhi. her day starts in the kitchen, where she strug­gles over the high sink every morn­ing to wash the break­fast dishes. Like Asha, Neha has never been to school, and like Asha, she is one of hun­dreds of thou­sands of child labor­ers believed to be work­ing as domes­tic helpers in homes across the nation.

Hir­ing young chil­dren to work as nan­nies and maids in India is increas­ingly com­mon. It’s also ille­gal. In 2006, India banned the employ­ment of chil­dren below the age of 14 in homes and restau­rants. And though the law has gone largely ignored by thou­sands of employ­ers, it is get­ting more atten­tion on national and inter­na­tional lev­els. Ear­lier this week, a U.S. State Depart­ment report on human traf­fick­ing indicted India for its lack of com­mit­ment to the issue, coin­cid­ing with a June 15 state­ment by a trial court in Delhi about the need to pun­ish agen­cies that recruit chil­dren, along with child work­ers’ fam­ily mem­bers. “We have lost our national con­science,” says Shan­tha Sinha, chair­per­son for the National Com­mis­sion of Pro­tec­tion of Child Rights (NCPCR). “Oth­er­wise why would edu­cated peo­ple break the law at every moment by employ­ing minors as domes­tic help and behav­ing like they are doing the chil­dren a favor?”

The Traf­fick­ing in Per­sons Report 2009, released on Tues­day, gave India a Tier 2 rat­ing for the sixth con­sec­u­tive year, cit­ing that India has not been able to sup­press human traf­fick­ing, “par­tic­u­larly bonded labor.” Accord­ing to a 2001 cen­sus, an esti­mated 185, 595 chil­dren are employed as domes­tic help and in small road­side eater­ies, a num­ber that is believed to have grown today. Most child domes­tic work­ers in India are traf­ficked by place­ment agen­cies oper­at­ing in poor states like Orissa, Jhark­hand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The agen­cies pay fam­i­lies in advance for their chil­dren and then place them at jobs in cities, tying the child to the agency until he or she pays off the money given to his fam­ily. The June court state­ment issued out of Delhi was over the case of local cou­ple who had been accused by police of hir­ing and ill-treating a 15-year-old girl work­ing as their maid. The cou­ple pleaded that they did not know the girl was a minor, and that the place­ment agency told them that she was over 18. The case put the spot­light back on the thou­sands of ille­gal agen­cies oper­at­ing in the Delhi and sur­round­ing region, and the need for a reg­u­la­tory body to mon­i­tor their activ­i­ties. Out of the 5000 odd place­ment agen­cies in the area, only 33 are registered.

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