Some Unexplored Economics of Roaming Child Workers

Within the net of child labour, there is a section of children who live their lives on the streets, without any kind of attachment with their family and maintain their livelihood through working as informal child workers. This study is based on these children who are termed here as ‘Roaming child workers’. It came out that apart from poverty of the parents there are other socio-economic reasons which force a child to come out from the family and work as child worker in the urban areas. It also came out from field survey that after leaving home a good number of children are economically better off and even able to keep themselves above the poverty line. But still they are very vulnerable. Through this study, effort has been made to prove that average monthly expenditure on substances of these ‘Roaming working children’ increases at a decreasing rate with their average monthly income, whereas, average monthly expenditure on entertainment shares a linear relationship with average monthly income.