UNREGULATED FACTORIES, 99
The Principle of Gradualness.
We do not seek to minimise the difficulties inherent in the
regulation of places of this kind. But we do not feel that they should
deter Government from taking the first steps in prohibiting the overworking
 of young children and in ensuring for the thousands of nen,
women and children employed in them the protection of reasonably
sanitary working conditions. We are conscious of the fact that we are
here dealing with a large variety of industries in varying degrees of
Prosperity, which hitherto have never been subject to any regulation,
®Xcept in respect of municipal sanitary enactments, which for the
Most part have been laxly enforced. No regulation, even of the
simplest kind, touching the workers themselves has ever been operative.
This makes it not only advisable but necessary to apply that principle of
gradualness which we have already shown to have characterised previous
measures for ameliorating industrial standards. It may be taken
for granted that, in the first instance, regulation will give rise to a variety
of methods of evasion on the part of some employers and parents but
this will be no more than a repetition of the past history of such regulation
 in countries with an older industrial background. For example,
in industries already carried on to a large extent as homework trades,
an increase in the number of homeworkers must at first be anticipated.
This will be effected primarily in order that any regulation in respect
of the hours of work and the starting age of child workers may be evaded,
but also in order to reduce the number of workers actually employed
on the premises and so escape the obligation to conform to a certain
minimum standard of ventilation and sanitation. Similarly, even
where homework is not possible, some employers may seek to evade
legal requirements by taking two neighbouring workshops instead of
one, 50 that no one place may employ sufficient workers to come within
the scope of the law, a course of action which cannot be overcome by
declaring that all places under one ownership shall be regarded as one
anit, since it is always open to an employer to register one or more in
the name of near relatives. While we recognise the inevitability of
tendencies of this kind, we believe that, in due course, when legislation
has been enforced for some time, such activities will largely cease. By
then not only will regulation have lost much of its terror for this type
of employer, but many of the steps taken to evade it will be found in
India, as elsewhere, to be uneconomic.
Compulsion and the Parent,
As far as the parents of the child workers typical of these industries
are concerned, we realise that we are here dealing with a class wholly
illiterate, exceedingly poor and only too often heavily indebted. It is
Inevitable that to these the child’s right to its childhood and even to such
education ag may be available should make no appeal comparable to
that of its earning capacity, however small. There would appear in
their case, as in that of the employers, no course open but that of compulsion
 by means of legislation so framed and so applied as to achieve
"he necessary end with the minimum of dislocation and hardship. Yet
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