Some forms of employment have been obstructing our human resource development programmes that remained with us since the inception of our planning era. While providing primary education to all has repeatedly been emphasised by our Constitution and many of our legal arrangements, high percentage of working children all over the country has stood in the way of achieving a respectable state of human resources. Although occurrence of this form of employment i.e. that of children is one that can be safely argued to be involuntary at all levels of decision making. However this is not the only form of such employment that aggravates well being rather than improving it. Such examples are hazardous rail or street hawking or collecting hazardous materials. From all evidences it is clear that 100% of the children above five years of age in poor families have to join the work force.

It is not to argue here that the problem can be eliminated just by prohibition of child labour by some human stroke of law. We should increase our understanding of the problem and it appears that the country has to take a few steps forward beyond supplying a conscience saving amount of food to primary education centres of our country.

Two major themes can be discovered in the literature trying to explain the phenomenon. The first one is that people maintain a high fertility rate because children can be sent to gainful activities that will increase income of the family. The second line puts the entire focus on the legal system of the country. Children become actually bonded through their parent’s indebtedness, which can only be eliminated with sufficiently effective legal and administrative instruments. In both lines of explanations it is not clear why does the explanatory factor exist. Moreover both the lines are empirically inadequate. Neither is our legal system silent on the issue nor is it true that there cannot be few other explanations of high fertility rate in poverty. High infant mortality rate, for example, may induce poor people to increase the number of children as some insurance whom they have to send to work at early age eventually.

A missing aspect of child labour or all other involuntary employment is the negative effects over time. Working children or any other person working in a similar unacceptable employment are deprived of education and result in a social loss. They pick up highly damaging activities like drug trafficking and some other serious type of crimes. These negative effects compound over time and increasingly draws out our scarce means. As putting children to work is the best that can be made in given conditions, the state should ensure that that the poor families should feel tangibly benefited by not putting their children to work and by sending them to school.

The analysis of the child labour problem, so far do not lend much support to the unwantedness of the phenomenon. Widely held view for quite a long time had been to view child labour as the benefit counterpart of intentional large families in poverty because children are directly productive after certain age and they provide old age security to parents. Thus this cannot properly be called involuntary. From such a point of view one may rather hastily conclude those parents' rearing of children, for sending them to work, i.e. treating them as assets, is what may be called inhuman capital?

Applicability of rationality assumption however is seriously questionable in the context of abject poverty and underdeveloped. The economic agents are neither perfectly informed of all the alternatives, nor is the choice set very large. No clear idea about the relationship between the actions chosen and their consequences really prevail. Families do operate with imperfect and incomplete information. The only relevance the concept welfare may have under such circumstances is that welfare or well-being means only survival in the least. Thus the level and growth of human capital are germinal carrying a possible collapse for the society.