Poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and forced labor have robbed many of the boys and girls in India's capital of their childhood, according to a United Nations report issued today. ``Why should we call them children?'' asked the UNICEF report, titled ``The Invisible Child.'' ``These children are grown-ups. These children are old.'' Citing statistics on child labor, health care, infant mortality and education, the report describes a life of grinding work and abuse for a child in New Delhi's slums. It also highlights the plight of India's urban poor, often forgotten in this largely agricultural nation of 880 million people. More than half of New Delhi's 8 million people inhabit the shantytowns, squatters huts and slums of this sprawling metropolis. While the average per capita income in the city is about $410, in the slums the people make one-tenth that amount, the report said. According to the report, more than 500,000 children, 80 percent of them illiterate and many underfed, are forced to work in New Delhi. About 40,000 work as laborers, 20,000 in car repair shops, 30,000 in restaurants and 30,000 as shop assistants, the report said. Tens of thousands more work in one-room factories where labor safety regulations are not enforced. Others scratch by as rag pickers, shoe shine boys, newspaper sellers and porters. Child labor is only outlawed in India for certain hazardous jobs. Many of the children are bonded labor, latter-day slaves, the report said. The pervasiveness of such servitude makes it difficult to wipe out. ``The children have to put up with long working hours, eight to 12 hours a day,'' the UNICEF report said. ``They face verbal, physical and sexual abuse from most people who deal with them.'' The necessity of work makes going to school impossible. The report said a survey of parents in the slums indicated that less than 5 percent wanted their children to stop working. They just wanted labor conditions to improve. Girls usually face the worst treatment, the study said, citing long-standing beliefs that girls are less valuable and provide less income to the family than boys. Girls are yanked from school faster than boys, fed less and forced into wedlock early, the report said. ``I work like a machine,'' says Parvati, a 13-year-old girl interviewed by UNICEF. Her parents leave her at home every day to look after her three siblings _ an 11-year-old brother and two sisters, 8 and 3. The family, economic refugees from Bihar, India's poorest state, lives in a hut near a construction site where their father was recently employed. Parvati has to prepare food, care for her siblings when they get sick and help her mother as a maid. At dinnertime, Parvati is allowed to eat only half the food of her brother. ``The only thing that makes me sad is when someone beats me,'' she says. The environment surrounding New Delhi's slums is also miserable. In many such areas, there is only one toilet for every 150 people and just one household in every 156 has access to potable water, the report said. ``The very notion of childhood is eroded by a hostile environment of poverty,'' the report said. The report urged the Indian government to recognize the rights to literacy, health care, play and vocational training of New Delhi's children.
