Almost thirty years ago, a boy named Iqbal Masih was shot dead near Lahore. He was twelve, the age most children should be in school, not running from factory owners and debt collectors.
Iqbal had escaped bonded labour in a carpet factory and begun speaking out against child exploitation. His courage made him a symbol of hope. His murder made him a symbol of our silence.
We remember him now and then, mostly in speeches or school assemblies, but rarely in action. Three decades later, millions of children in Pakistan still work in factories, fields and homes. We have learnt to look away and convenience has made us complicit.
We pass them every day: a boy carrying bricks on a construction site, a girl washing dishes in someone else’s kitchen, a child at a traffic signal wiping windshields. They’re everywhere and invisible at the same time. We see them, but we don’t see them.
Child labour isn’t just a symptom of poverty; it’s a feature of how our economy works. Families don’t send their children to work because they don’t care about education. They send them because they can’t afford not to. When a father earns barely enough for food, a son’s daily wages, however small, can mean survival. It’s a cruel arithmetic – one meal or one day of schooling.
Education, the supposed escape, often fails them too. Public schools are free in theory but expensive in practice. Hidden costs like uniforms, books and transportation pile up. For families in rural areas, the nearest school might be kilometres away, and when a child finally gets there, teachers may not. It’s challenging to convince a parent that education is the solution when the system is barely functioning. So, the child trades a pen for a pair of pliers and joins the workforce long before learning to write their own name.
Our laws say this shouldn’t happen. On paper, Pakistan has banned child labour in factories, workshops and hazardous jobs. We’ve signed international conventions and declared our commitment to ending bonded labour. But paper doesn’t inspect factories and declarations don’t feed families. Labour inspections are rare, punishments are light and most of the work happens informally – far from the reach of any law. It’s not that we lack rules; we lack will.
Then there’s us, the rest of society, who quietly benefit from this system. We buy the cheap carpets, the stitched footballs, the handmade clothes and the restaurant meals served by children half our age. We like the convenience and the low prices – and we don’t ask questions. Every time we do that, we’re voting for the system to stay exactly as it is.
Iqbal’s story reminds us that exploitation persists not just through greed, but also through indifference. He spoke up at a time when most stayed silent, exposing how children were trapped in bonded labour, a debt that never really ended. He risked everything to tell that truth and we, all these years later, still haven’t listened.
We keep thinking child labour will disappear once poverty does. But poverty doesn’t vanish by itself; it’s dismantled through policy and persistence. Countries that have made real progress passed laws and also invested in families. Brazil’s Bolsa Família and Bangladesh’s stipends for school attendance showed that when you give parents financial breathing room, they stop sending their children to work. Pakistan could build on its existing social support systems by linking assistance more closely to school attendance. If a child is in class, the family should be rewarded. If not, the payment should stop. It’s simple accountability that turns good intentions into real change.
Education must also mean something; a classroom without learning is just another form of neglect. We need qualified teachers, relevant curricula, and schools that actually prepare students for employment. Otherwise, the promise of education feels hollow, and the pull of work wins.
We also need to name and shame. Publicly available inspection data, factory audits and supply chain disclosures should be non-negotiable. Exploitation thrives behind closed doors and it shrinks when it’s exposed.
But none of this will matter unless we change how we see child labour, not as a distant issue, but as part of who we are. The uncomfortable truth is that our comfort depends on someone else’s hardship. It’s easier to feel pity for child workers than to take responsibility for them and that’s why the problem persists.
Iqbal Masih was only twelve when he understood something most adults still don’t: that silence protects the oppressor, not the oppressed. His death was supposed to wake us up. Instead, we’ve gone back to sleep.
Ending child labour isn’t just about rescuing children from factories. It’s about rescuing our own conscience from convenience. Because until we stop treating child labour as someone else’s tragedy, it will keep being our collective shame. Until the day we stop finding children in workshops and start finding them in classrooms, we’re not progressing, we’re just pretending.
The writer is a non-resident fellow at the CISS.
He posts/tweets @umarwrites
