India has made encouraging progress in recent years on reducing the number of children forced to work instead of pursuing their education. Unfortunately, recent actions by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are threatening to stall, or even reverse, that progress.

Between 2001 and 2011, according to official figures supplied by the government, the number of child laborers in India declined from 12.6 million to 4.3 million. But in a nation of 1.2 billion people, 400 million of them very poor, these numbers seem suspiciously low. UNICEF put the figure at 28 million. Either way, millions of India’s children are denied an education, forced to toil on farms, in small-scale industries and as domestic help.

Millions of Indian children who are said to be working in “family” businesses are in fact trafficked into slave labor or sold into bonded labor.

To fight this scourge, India passed landmark legislation in 2009 guaranteeing free, compulsory primary education. In 2012, it introduced a bill to ban all work by children under the age of 14. Last month, however, the cabinet approved a huge loophole to these laws that would allow children under 14 to work in “family enterprises.”

Photo: Children working on a railway track in New Delhi. UN Photo/Jean Pierre Laffont.