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SPORTS: FOOTBALL CONTROVERSY

Missed Goals

With the countdown to the 2002 World Cup promising huge sales, Indian football makers get the jitters as an NGO raises the issue of child labour

By Sharda Ugra in Jalandhar

Big guys versus little guys. It's the kind of contest that is made in sporting heaven but this particular one is being played out not on some muddy field but through the medium of angry official communiques. Indian football manufacturers are up in arms against claims by a Delhi-based NGO that child labour was rife in the industry and that its under-age work force could total up to 10,000. The office of the World Federation of Sports Goods Industries (WFSGI) has stepped in to protest, the Jalandhar-based Sports Goods Foundation of India (SGFI) is contemplating legal action and the NGO, Global March Against Child Labour, maintains that the industry is underplaying the extent of the problem.

At the centre of the ruckus is a business that, due to stiff competition from Chinese exporters and controversy surrounding the use of child labour in stitching footballs, has suffered considerable losses. Football exports, which in 1999-2000 constituted 44 per cent of all Indian sporting goods exports, dropped by nearly 23 per cent from Rs 125.54 crore in 1998-1999 to Rs 102.23 crore in 1999-2000, according to Sports Goods Export Promotion Council and the industry is still smarting.

Industry leaders believe the negative publicity abroad over the issue of child labour has affected their business and a fresh wave has just hit them. With less than a year to go before soccer's biggest and most lucrative event, the World Cup, the Indian industry (which supplies "promotional" balls used for recreational and marketing purposes in the run up to the event) has decided that retaliation is the first step to mending its reputation and reversing the free fall in its bottom line.

Last month, Global March launched a campaign titled "Kick Child Labour Out of Football" in Tokyo. A press release stated that "overall 10,000 (children) are involved in stitching football in Punjab, India alone and another 15,000 in Pakistan".

The Indian industry is outraged and its parent body, the WFSGI, has reacted sharply to the figures, claiming they are grossly exaggerated. WFSGI secretary Andre Georgemans in a letter to Child Labour News (which operates out of the same premises as Global March) accused the NGO of using sensationalism as a way to generate funds and "get the attention of the uninformed public". P.C. Sondhi, core committee member of the SGFI, says, "These figures are ridiculous. We would like them to show us where they got these figures from?"

But Kailash Satyarthi, chairperson of Global March, is unfazed. He told INDIA TODAY that the number of 10,000 mentioned in the report referred not to children employed in football stitching but to "the Indian sports industry as a whole". As for football stitchers, he says, "No one knows the exact number but they are in thousands, I'm quite sure of that." The SGFI is furious at this lack of precision and claims the timing is typical of Satyarthi's group. Satyarthi responds, "The nucleus of the launch in Japan was football but we wanted to raise the question of child labour all over the world ... you have to find a window and that window for us is the football World Cup."

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