Counting of child labour: some concepts and practice

Subrato K. Mondal, Population Foundation of India, India

This paper describes practical challenges in researching marginal and elusive population and innovative approaches to overcome some of such bottlenecks. It also describes how methodological complexities can be simplified by using some clear idioms. Survey of Child labour in developing country is always a challenge. Main problem arises in defining the universe for the sample survey of child labour. Second problem arises during estimating required sample size for the sample survey because of lots of conceptual ambiguity. Barriers of counting child labour arise in developing country like India can be describes in two ways- one is due to various conceptual disparities and another is due to methodological bottleneck and/or ignorance. This paper consists of three sections- first section describes conceptual disparities. Second section describes the methodological issues. And the third one actually consolidates earlier sections and provides some guidelines to overcome both.