Abstract:
At the doorstep of twenty first century, education has been adopted as a central theme in the development
policy dialogue both in national and international arena. As education is the basic pre-condition of economic
prosperity, the reconstruction of rural society at a very high social and cultural level is bound up not only
with the eradication of poverty but also with the elimination of ignorance, superstition and unconsciousness
with the light of education. Thus, microfinance programme through financial inclusion has attempted to
address this challenge among other components of poverty alleviation. But it has been observed that total
labour demand increases due to increasing credit supply into family enterprises through financial inclusion
and thus increases the children’s workload. An attempt has been made in the present study to evaluate the
impact of microenterprise participation on schooling and child labour issue has been examined through the
empirical evidence of West Bengal by collecting primary data in the selected districts of West Bengal. This
study unfortunately exhibits persistent dropout of children from school and this phenomenon appears to be
exacerbated by growing demand for labour due to the growth of the household enterprises. It has been also
found that many of microenterprises have tried to achieve expected level of sustainability by engaging their
children in enterprises instead of using hired labour.
