Patna, December 10
MLAs of the ruling JD(U) and the BJP, besides the CPI(ML), in the Bihar Assembly today demanded the resignation of union minister and senior RJD leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh.

The demand came after a report yesterday on how 10-year-old children replaced bullocks to plough land belonging to the minister’s family at Sahpur village of Vaishali district. Prasad is the minister for rural development and in that capacity supervises the National Rural Employment Gurantee Programme.

While the minister’s younger brother Raghuraj Singh justified the act saying that children were being used because the fields were too slippery for bullocks, the children said they needed to make a living.

Apparently unfazed over such alleged gross violation of the prevailing anti-child labour act promising to eradicate this social menace, Raghuvansh Prasad reportedly claimed that the children were probably being used to sow seeds, and not to plough the fields. “We do not need any ploughing in the fields during this season.They must have helped in throwing seeds in the field.The media has hyped the issue,” the minister said reportedly defending his brother’s act.

Sources in the government, meanwhile, said the DM of Vaishali has already been instructed to file an FIR against the minister’s brother after probing the issue.

The use of child labour is, however, said to be a hard reality in rural Bihar. The situation is so desperate following decades long legacy of underdevelopment that there is no dearth of human ploughs. There were reportedly about 10 lakh child labourers who were working both inside and outside Bihar.

So, like animals, these children go on ploughing fields dawn to dusk and no mercy is reportedly shown even if their back breaks.One of the children employed in the fields of minister’s brother, Sonu Lal Kumar, was reported to have said: “Pair, hath mein dard rahta hai. Kya karien? Karna parega khaane ke liye.(My hands and feet ache all the time, but I cannot leave this work. I need to work for food.)”

With the much hyped anti-child labour policy seemed to have little bearing in government’s own backyard, what perhaps remained unsaid was that the poor boys, unlike bullocks, would not mind meeting injuries if they skidded on the slippery fields to earn a meal for them.

Patna, December 10
Union rural development minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh today downplayed allegations of forced child labour by his kin saying that the whole episode was “stage-managed.” “The incident beamed on TV channels has been stage-managed. Not only politicians but even common people have the desire to show their faces on national channels,” Singh said.

TV channels had yesterday shown two child labourers working on a land in Gujarat’s Vaishali district owned by Raghuraj Singh, the brother of the union minister.

“In fact, I have come to know that some TV channel people went to Shahpur in Vaishali district to have footage on the areas which are still waterlogged even after floods have receded,” he said.

When the crew found that they cannot get a story, they approached the villagers to hire two children for ploughing and they (children and villagers) must have posed for the cameras so that their faces will be shown on channels,” he claimed.— PTI