new He works at a grocery store from eight in the morning to 11 at night, for which he gets the paltry equivalent of US$6 a month. But 13-year-old Berket, who says he gets no day off, considers himself lucky.

''I could hardly take three meals a day when I was in my village home with my poor parents,'' he says.

Now, says Berket, he has food, shelter and even some money at the end of each month.

The young daughters of Moyeen, a rickshaw puller, are probably looking at their fates in a similar manner.

Moyeen says he has let his daughters work as maids here in Dhaka because he can no longer support his family of five all by himself.

''I am unable to pull the rickshaw regularly due to respiratory trouble,'' he says. ''The monthly earnings of my two daughters amounting to about US$10 are a great (help) to my family.''

Poverty is the root of child labour in Bangladesh, and experts say this is the reason why there is no ''immediate prospect'' that the practice can be eliminated quickly.

Says labour leader A Harun: ''As long as poverty remains, there is no chance of eradicating child labour from Bangladesh where 50 percent of the total population lives below the poverty line.

Thirty million people of this impoverished country live in extreme poverty.'' Still, the experts say that this should be no excuse for any slackening of efforts to at least prevent children from taking on hazardous work, adding that more measures to limit the number of families dependent on children's incomes should be drawn up.

They also say that with Bangladesh already having nearly 7.5 million child workers between the age of five and 14, it is time for the government to finally have a comprehensive programme addressing this social scourge.

Peter Stalker, a consultant to several UN agencies, even estimates that there are about 13 million Bangladeshi children being put to work, ''with perhaps another eight million between ages of 10 and 14''.

Piecemeal efforts

Yet Dhaka seems content on relying on piecemeal efforts that, however laudable, can only do so much for too few children.

Indeed, experts note that many of these efforts are initiatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international groups.

Recently, Dhaka signed an agreement with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Dutch government to implement a project aimed at eliminating the worst forms of child labour here in the capital, including work with heavy machinery, welding and automobiles.

The US$4.8 million project will be implemented by four NGOs, among them the Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM) and Thengamara Mohila Sabuj Sangha (TMSS), which will provide non-formal education to the children.

The Underprivileged Children's Education Programme (UCEP) will provide training and employment services to them while the Resources Integration Centre (RIC) will conduct a micro-credit programme for income-generating activities for the parents or guardians of the working children.

Reduce dependence

Experts say one crucial component of the project is the attempt to reduce the parents' dependence on their children's incomes. In many slum households, the children's wages make up a hefty third of the family income.

The experts also hail the measures meant to prevent new children replacing the ''withdrawn'' boys and girls in workplaces, such as the technical and advisory services provided to employers to help them make up for the loss of their child workers.

An advocacy and awareness raising campaign against child labour will also be launched locally and nationally as part of the project, a move that observers say would help make up for the fact that the scope of most of the activities is limited to Dhaka.

Only 17 percent of Bangladesh's child workers are in the urban areas. The majority are in the rural areas.

Bangladesh's Factories Act of 1965 actually prohibits the employment of children under the age of 14, but experts point out that the law covers only the formal sector where a mere four percent of the country's child workers are found. P> The implementation also leaves much to be desired.

To be sure though, Dhaka has tried to keep children in schools for as long as possible. Since 1994, the government has run a 'Food for Education Programme' in which nearly 1.7 million primary school age children get 15 kgs of wheat or rice a month so long as they attend 85 percent of their classes.

These days, the present administration is thinking of expanding the programme to three million primary school-going children in the countryside. For the so-called ''hard to reach urban children,'' a four-year project that ends this December has provided many of them with basic education.

The project, jointly sponsored by the governments of Bangladesh and Sweden, and funded by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), caters to boys and girls between eight and 14 years who attend non-formal schools run by NGOs.

Many of these children are believed to be working in factories, shops and markets near their slum homes. The project provides them with free textbooks, pencils and papers for their basic education classes.

Backfired measure

But meantime, a well-intentioned measure by a foreign government seems to have backfired and brought more harm to children it meant to help.

According to one Unicef study, a US ban against goods believed to have been produced fully or partially by child labour drove fired child workers in the garment sector into more hazardous jobs.

When US Senator Tom Harkin had presented his bill in 1993, he had argued that its passage would discourage child labour and lead the young workers back to school.

Here in Bangladesh, the Unicef reports that the Harkins law led to the dismissal of some 50,000 child workers — most of them girls— from garment factories across the country. But most of these children did not go back to school.

Instead, says the Unicef, they wound up in jobs that exposed them to more risks, and for which they were paid even less. Some also took to sex work just to survive.