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Vocational Education for Adolescent Workers: some Policy Options
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We find in this paper that the option of providing vocational education to adolescent labour, an important step in reducing their economic exploitation, is constrained by a number of factors. First, the low educational status of adolescent labourers implies that formal vocational facilities (requiring high school pass certificate as the eligibility) available in the area are not suitable. Second, those formal institutions which are managed by private agencies, charge high tuition fees and collect high amounts of capitation. Third, the fact that adolescent labourers have been mostly working in agriculture, livestock rearing, hotels, quarrying, etc., implies that they will have no inclination towards motor mechanism and/ or electronics (offered by formal training institutions). Fourth, there are no informal trainers in the selected villages to provide vocational training to less educated adolescent labourers. Fifth, a majority of the adolescent labourers belonged households primarily dependent on wage-labour as the source of livelihood. This would make it difficult for them to afford sending their children to the existing institutions where the expenses were on the higher side. They also incur higher opportunity cost of labour, given that the adolescent labourers made a significant contribution to the household income. Finally, parents of adolescent labourers did not have any particular aspirations mainly on account of limited exposure outside of their own domains of work. If at all they had any, these confirmed the phenomenon of frozen parental expectations.
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