The fight against child labour and child marriage has a new breed of warriors in Assam – comics commandos.
An organisation conducting an educational programme to reduce school dropout has prepared a team of 30 local youths in the Balijan block of western Assam’s Goalpara district.
These young men and women have been taught to draw caricatures and doodles to campaign against social evils and rights violations. Armed with pencils and other drawing materials, they have been tasked with telling comic book-style stories to convey their message in a sequential manner.
“Visual stories with minimum text, infused with humour, work better as tools to create awareness than speaking against or sermonising on serious issues such as child marriage and child labour,” Kuldeep Das, the district coordinator of the education team of Centre for Microfinance and Livelihood told The Hindu on Sunday.
He and his team organised a Grassroots Comics workshop as a part of an advocacy campaign in the district’s Bodahapur High School last week. The workshop focused on countering child labour and child marriage, two of Assam’s major social problems.
Children invariably drop out of schools to augment the family income, often as domestic help in urban centres and as labourers in the unorganised sector. Parents marrying off their minor daughters to “lessen our financial burden” has also been a factor behind the high dropout rate.
In November 2022, Assam’s Education Minister Ranoj Pegu said the dropout rate in lower primary schools in 2021-22 almost doubled to 6.02% from 3.3% in 2020-21.
“An alternative media like comics, understandable to the common people, can bring awareness in society,” Mr. Das said.
Amrith Basumatary from World Comics India, which promotes grassroots comics, said such storytelling has an impact more often than not. “The participation of teachers and members of school management committees of five institutions in the area underscores the power of comics as a narrative,” he said.
“I have seen how parents from low-income groups in my village forced their children to work in brick kilns or other people’s farms. The comic strips I created are on such cases of child abuse and how to counter them,” Dhanbir Rabha, a participant from Goalpara district’s Gendabari village said.
Karishma Rabha from Rongsai village and Evarani Barman from Dwarka village narrated stories about how the academic dreams of some bright children they encountered were dashed when their parents made them work to augment the family income.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma launched a crackdown against child marriage in 2023, vowing to end social evil by 2026. An Indian Child Protection report in July said Assam’s model – a mix of incentives and punishment – helped reduce child marriage in the State by 81% but officials say the numbers are still high, especially in areas dominated by migrant Muslims.
