At an age when children in this country are either at home playing or starting out in school these youngsters in India are putting in a day's work on a building site.
Struggling to hold up shovels which are as tall as them, they are helping to build drainage works in front of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Dehli in time for the Commonwealth Games which takes place this autumn.
They shovel stones into baskets which are then carried away by other children as their parents work nearby on the same construction project.
Parents who bring their children to work on the site have been promised extra bonuses such as money for bread and milk for their children, on top of their normal pay.
Children and parents also receive an additional meal if both of them work on the site.
The Games are due to be held in the Indian capital from October 3-14, but concerns remain over construction of its sporting and transport infrastructure.
The sheer scale of the project has drawn an enormous population of migrant workers from all over India.
And now it seems children have also been drafted in to get the stadium and its surrounding area finished on time.
This week the High Court of Delhi has sought a response from the Government over the alleged failure to provide all the benefits of labour laws to workers involved in construction work for the coming Commonwealth Games.
Workers are being paid below the minimum wage in order to complete these projects whilst also being forced to live and work under sub-standard conditions.
The Commonwealth Games Federation has repeatedly expressed concern about the slow pace of work for the Games, which will involve 6,000 athletes drawn from the former British Empire competing in 17 sports.
Federation president Mike Fennell said in December he was distressed by a report by the CGF evaluation commission that two major venues would not be ready until June, barely three months before the opening ceremony.
The commission said that work on the Nehru stadium, where the opening and closing ceremonies and the athletics programme will be held, and the swimming complex, was way behind schedule
Child labor in third world/developing countries, to me, is the bane of modern society. The situation is already bad enough such that the poor man is often bound to a vicious circle of crude labor, and by subjecting small children to the same thing would leave them devoid of the only thing that could bring them out of this misery: education. To me, each child should be forced to go to (atleast) primary school so that they will have some sort of foundation for a job of higher education. It is naive to assume that they can just go to school without working, but in the real life this is just impossible since the parents need all the help/money they can get. However, I think they should allow the children go to school and let them work after it. Education, in the long run, is much more critical than a few rupees.
However, stories such as this one provide hope for the children and even we can learn a thing or two from the motivation that some of these kids exhibit.
