Aid to India (2)

Tim W highlights this heart-rending article.

My mantra has always been "Trade not aid!" but it might be useful to crunch some numbers:

Taking a round mid-figure of 100 million child workers in India (nearly ten per cent of the total population of India), and assuming that they can all earn 40 rupees/60 pence a day, assuming the poor little buggers work 7 days a week, that gives them an income of about £200 a year. The article does not make clear how much they have to pay for accommodation, but let's assume they're not being ripped off by their landlords, so 100 million children x £200 = £20 billion.

(A typical sort of salary for India seems to be £900 a year, so the claim in the article that children earn one-fifth as much as adults seems correct. So £200 a year is nowhere near as bad as it sounds, even though the working conditions are awful.)

The article says rather vaguely "The Indian textile industry is now worth hundreds of billions of pounds", which would appear to be complete and utter bollocks. According to this, the total value is £25 billion and exports are £10 billion; textile exports account for 20 per cent of total exports, so that makes total exports of £50 billion.

Of course, of those 100 million child workers, we don't know how many manufacture goods for export, let's guess one-fifth, so out of £50 billion going into the Indian economy, child workers earn £4 billion. Which doesn't seem too terrible.

(Next point, child labour was perfectly common in England until the end of the 19th century. India is a long way behind us in terms of economic development, but I doubt it will take more than 50 years from now for child labour to be unheard of.)

So we've looked at the "trade" side.

I looked at the "aid" side in this earlier post , it appears that India has got plenty of money to spend on other crap, so "aid" can't be the way either.

I also love the way that the article kicks off with "we reveal the brutal reality of a supply chain that sees children as young as 11 sewing T-shirts which cost shoppers just a few pounds to buy on high streets across Britain". Would the Guardianista be happier if Primark had bigger mark-ups?