At the crack of dawn on Tuesday, 12-year-old Aarti and her friends set out as usual from their homes in East Delhi's slums to a neighboring residential area, where they work as maids.
Some of the girls had heard rumors of India's new ban on child labor, which prohibits people from hiring children under the age of 14 as domestic servants or workers in places like hotels and tea shops.
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Aarti, who gives her earnings to her mother every month to help meet household expenses, is scared that if the law is implemented, it may mean no food on the table for her and her siblings.
In millions of families across India, children like Aarti go out and work at odd jobs to supplement the meager income their uneducated parents earn. Although India's laws already ban the employment of children in hazardous jobs like mines and factories, there are thousands who continue to do such work.
Human Rights Watch estimates there are between 60 and 115 million child laborers in India.
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Activists in the field say just passing a law will do little to change the situation. "These children don't start working at an early age out of choice," says documentary filmmaker Nila Madhav Panda. "They do it so they can get a day's meal."
He adds, "The government should first ensure that their needs of food, housing and education are met. Then these children can stop working and possibly have a normal childhood."
Panda says that unless the government attempts to rehabilitate the children, they'll end up without any means to survive.
People who employ children say the same thing. Latha Nair, a schoolteacher who hires Aarti to wash dishes and clean her house, says: "I ensure she gets food to eat and money to take home each month. If no one employed her, she'd probably be begging on the streets, because her family cannot survive without the extra income."
Yet some employers were treading delicately on the first day of the ban. Shops in New Delhi's markets posted signs announcing they do not employ child laborers. Some children who work in small market clothing and food stalls said their employers told them to stay away for a few days.
India's government has threatened to punish violators with a year in prison or a fine of about $200, or both. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised that action would be taken against those who broke the law. In a statement, Singh said: "For children released from work, arrangements for providing education have been made by the government in all the states."
But despite the availability of public education, it's unlikely that the parents of child laborers will send their children to school unless they can find other ways to make ends meet.
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