Child labour affects millions of children across the globe. Most of these affected children reside in economically less developed countries struggling with social problems such as poverty, inadequate educational opportunities and gender inequality. The harsh labour denies young ones of their childhood and jeopardizes their health and life chances.

Pakistan has ever inflating child labour rates. Millions of Pakistani child labourers work on wages in informal economic sector. The wage labour includes jobs such as apprenticeship at workshops, work at brick kilns, bangle production, domestic services and construction work.

Categorizing a particular “work” as “child labour” depends upon a number of factors including child’s age, type of work, working hours and conditions. However, work that deprives children of their childhood, potential and dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development is deemed as child labour. The last Government administered child labour survey in year 1996 highlighted that 3.3 of 40 million children (8.3 percent) were full time workers. Concomitantly, 16.4 percent of children aged 5-17 years were involved in child labour in Punjab in year 2014. Given that country wide, valid and recent data is unavailable, hence assessing the nature, size, causes, and forms of child labour emerges as a challenge in present time.

In this regard, the present survey on child labour has been commissioned by the Labour and Human Resource Department of the Govt. of Punjab in collaboration with the Punjab Bureau of Statistics during May 2015. The survey was aimed at understanding child labour causes by studying child’s family background through Socio-economic Status and educational attainment of household members, particularly parents. It also aimed to identify child labour jobs and skills they required.

The survey has been conducted in all 36 districts of the province where all the workplaces were covered. The target population of the survey was in line with the ILO’s definition. Urban areas were distributed into blocks, which were further listed for child labour workplaces. The prerequisite training of the field teams and pre-testing of the questionnaire was done in Lahore. An extensive plan based on the listing of blocks was followed to locate the child labour workplaces. Accordingly, children working at various workplaces were identified and interviewed. Management and preliminary analysis of the data for district Bahawalpur were done at Bureau of Statistics, Punjab. During the course of field operations, all implied ethical considerations were observed.