Breaking down the question

The command phrase — what actionable measures would you suggest — is prescriptive: it asks the candidate to propose concrete, workable interventions rather than merely to describe the problem. The word recurrent is a clue, signalling that child labour resists elimination and returns because its structural roots persist. A strong answer therefore diagnoses those roots briefly and then builds remedies that address them.

The analytical premise is that child labour is not primarily a legal failure but a symptom of poverty and informality. Jan Breman shows how the informal economy shields child work from regulation, while Myron Weiner locates the deeper failure in the state's reluctance to compel universal schooling. Effective measures must therefore be convergent — economic, educational, and regulatory together.

At ten marks the answer should be a structured set of reasoned suggestions, not a wish list.

How to approach it

  • Open with the diagnosis: child labour recurs because poverty and informality reproduce it.
  • Propose demand-side measures — income support and social security for poor households.
  • Propose supply-side measures — schooling, mid-day meals, and bridging for out-of-school children.
  • Propose regulatory measures — stronger inspection, closing the family-enterprise loophole, supply-chain accountability.
  • Conclude on convergence and community vigilance as the key to durability.

Ground the discussion in the informal sector and child labour note.

Model answer

Child labour recurs in India because the framework of prohibition addresses the symptom while its causes — household poverty and a vast unregulated informal economy — remain intact. Actionable measures must therefore work on those causes simultaneously.

The first cluster is economic and demand-side. Since poor families depend on children's earnings, prohibition without support merely drives the practice underground. Strengthening income guarantees, conditional cash transfers linked to school attendance, and social security for informal households reduces the compulsion to send children to work. Rehabilitating rescued children with stipends prevents the relapse that makes the problem recurrent.

The second cluster is educational and supply-side. Myron Weiner argued that the decisive lever is compulsory, attractive schooling. Universal enrolment backed by mid-day meals, residential bridge schools for out-of-school and migrant children, and vocational tracks for older adolescents give families a viable alternative to the workplace. Education is the most durable form of prevention because it changes the child's trajectory rather than merely removing them from one job.

The third cluster is regulatory and enforcement. Jan Breman's account of informality explains why factory-style inspection fails: most child work is hidden in homes, farms, and small workshops. Measures here include better-resourced and better-trained labour inspection, closing the 2016 amendment's family-enterprise exemption that legitimises household labour, holding supply chains and contractors accountable, and swifter prosecution with meaningful penalties. Migration corridors need special monitoring, since displaced children are the most vulnerable.

Underpinning all three is convergence and vigilance: education, welfare, and labour departments must act together, and local bodies, panchayats, and civil society must maintain community-level watchfulness so that rescued children do not slip back. Child labour will be curbed durably only when the alternatives to it — a schooled childhood and a secure household income — are made real.

Examiner's perspective

The examiner rewards a script that is genuinely prescriptive and structured, not a lament about the scale of the problem. The organising insight — that the practice is recurrent because its economic and informal roots persist — should frame the whole answer and justify why measures must be convergent.

Grouping suggestions into economic, educational, and regulatory clusters demonstrates analytical control, and citing Weiner for the educational lever and Breman for the informality problem lifts the answer above generic policy recall. The strongest scripts close on convergence and community vigilance, showing awareness that durability, not one-off rescue, is the real challenge.