"No children in the fields!": Baykomm - Bayer Kommunikationszentrum

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“No children in the fields!”

Chandra Kalar can hardly wait: every morning she puts on her green school uniform, packs her knapsack and sets off from her village Armagidda in India. It’s a long journey, past numerous cotton fields in which hybrid seed is produced. In most of the fields, workers are busily bent over their work. With quick movements, they remove the anther from each cotton blossom. The next day, the pistils are pollinated with other pollen. Here, in the middle of Andra Pradesh province in India's "cotton belt", everyone knows how this is done. After all, for many people in this region, seasonal work in the cotton fields is the only way to support their family.

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“Children used to work in these fields as well,” says Raman Janegulu. “Nowadays, however, most of them go to school.” Raman should know, because he’s a teacher here. He works in a Creative Learning Center – a facility designed to prepare the children for instruction in public schools that ensures that they are not at a disadvantage when they enroll.

There are now about 30 such Creative Learning Centers in the region. They owe their existence to an initiative of Proagro, a subsidiary of Bayer CropScience, and the Indian-based Naandi Foundation. The centers are a key factor in the effort to eliminate child labor; after all, this involves not just protecting the children from work, but also offering them a school education.

The project was launched in 2004. A key element is that if farmers want to sell their products to Proagro, they must first promise not to employ children in their fields. Several times a month, all the fields are inspected by observers without prior notice. If children are discovered working in the fields, the respective farmer is immediately asked to explain himself. The first offense results in a warning; repeat offenses result in the cancellation of the supply contract.

Yet positive incentives are more important than penalties. That’s why all farmers who demonstrably do not employ children are paid a bonus: they receive 7.5 percent more than the standard price.
Nearly 1,000 schoolchildren have visited the Creative Learning Centers so far. Almost all of them subsequently enrolled in a public school. And the project’s initiators can point to another accomplishment as well: with increasing frequency, observers come back from their inspection tours and are able to report: “No children in the fields!”