The politics of deferral: Denaturalizing the ‘economic value’ of children’s labor in India

Abstract

Do poor people love their children less? In the case of child laborers, this seemingly straightforward question has generated a range of complex responses. This includes research within the value of children (VOC) framework with its tendency to pathologize parents by framing discussions on children’s labor within household-based economic decision-making. In a stark departure from this framework, this article, focused on India, foregrounds the key role played by post-independence development policies in naturalizing child labor. It offers the ‘politics of deferral’ as an alternate analytic to draw attention to both the incremental as well as the exclusionary logics that underlie the Indian state’s efforts to eradicate child labor through schooling. To what extent does a country like India – where state policies have largely failed to substantively separate children from labor – compel us to realign the current depoliticized, ahistorical and binary (between the economic and the sentimental) framing of children’s value privileged within VOC demographic research?