In Assam, ‘comics commandos’ join fight against child labour

Assam's comics commandos fight child labour and marriage through grassroots comics, creating awareness in a creative and impactful way.

GUWAHATI

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.