MUMBAI – It began as a school project, became a citywide campaign, and is now a national social media campaign aimed at getting communities to address child labour in India.

Kunaal Bhargava, 17, a student at the American School in Mumbai, picked child labour for a classroom project. He approached Salaam Baalak Trust, a charity that works with street children, for help with material.

The Mumbai police were so impressed with the poster campaign he created that it was adapted for billboards across the city earlier this year.

This week, a citizen engagement platform LocalCircles, which connects its more than 1 million members in discussions on governance and other matters of public interest, created a discussion group on child labour to seek input on the issue. “Child labour is an issue I think about a lot, as these are kids as old as me, younger than me, working instead of going to school like me,” said Bhargava. “We encounter it every day, so getting the community involved is an effective way to check child labour,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

There are 5.7 million Indian child workers aged between five and 17, out of 168 million globally, according to the International Labour Organization.

More than half are in agriculture, toiling in cotton, sugarcane and rice paddy fields, and over a quarter work in manufacturing, embroidering clothes, weaving carpets or making match sticks. Kids also work in restaurants and hotels, washing dishes and chopping vegetables, and in middle-class homes.

The Indian government wants to amend a three-decade-old law which bans children under 14 from working in 18 hazardous occupations and 65 processes including mining, gem cutting, cement manufacture and hand looms.

However, children who help their family or family businesses are permitted to work outside school hours, and those in entertainment or sports can also work, provided it does not affect their studies.

Members of the LocalCircles group can, in addition to offering suggestions, post pictures and report instances of child labour that the police and NGOs can act on, said founder Sachin Taparia. “This platform is more effective than a hotline – how many people will actually remember the number or think to call when they see a child worker in a tea stall or begging on the street?” he said. “Whereas people are so comfortable taking pictures and posting on social media, and this facilitates that,” he said.

Suggestions from the discussion group so far include stricter punishment for employers of child workers and training programmes for such children, so they can learn skills which could be used to earn an income when they are older.

Poor reintegration of rescued child workers leaves them vulnerable to being trafficked and made to work again, a report by Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights said last month.

The LocalCircles group for child labour is managed by the Indian Police Foundation, a think tank comprising police officials, bureaucrats and civil society leaders.

Community policing has already played a role in fighting child labour and human trafficking, Taparia said, citing police raids on illegal brothels in Delhi and Gurgaon as a result of information given by members of LocalCircles discussion groups. “The police, the NGOs – we are all doing our bit to check child labour, and having citizens involved will only help create more awareness and rescue more child workers,” said Pravin Patil, a deputy commissioner of police in Mumbai.

MUMBAI – India’s all-singing, all-dancing movie hits capture the attention of hundreds of millions of fans – but they generate precious little in box office profits for the world’s largest cinema industry.

Now, with smartphone sales booming and India preparing for nationwide 4G Internet access, India’s film and TV industry hopes the ease of tapping your phone for the latest release will generate profits at last, overcoming the problems of woefully few cinemas and rampant piracy.

India has about 10,000 cinema screens across a country of 1.3 billion – 8 for every million people, compared with 120 in the United States and 30 in China, according to digital film distribution network UFO Moviez.

That low density means that for most Indians, pirated content is the only way to see movies, costing the industry some 30 per cent of potential annual gross collections.

“Even if we can manage to get a small fraction of the people to pay on their phones, you are looking at a market that can potentially become bigger than the box office,” said Girish Johar, head of revenue at Essel Vision Production, part of Zee Entertainment Enterprises, one of India’s largest media groups.

The profit boost for studios will in large part be driven by the rush for local-language content from platforms like Netflix Inc, which launched in India this year and is aggressively adding to its Hindi-language catalogue.

Homegrown rivals, though keen to forge partnerships with online streaming companies, are introducing their own platforms, a new revenue stream for production firms that earn little from either cinemas or DVD sales.

And the numbers add up.

Seven out of 10 Indians watch at least one online video a month, and in the next three years nearly 90 per cent of all Internet data in India is expected to be used towards streaming movies and television.

PAYING UP

Key to the boom is cheap, fast, mobile broadband nationwide, which this year promises to bring millions online, even outside big cities.

That means better viewing – and easier payment.

India’s cash-rich Reliance Industries is expected to roll out one of the world’s largest 4G networks this year when it launches its Jio mobile network.

To keep up, incumbent players Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular are cutting Internet charges and building out their own high-speed data networks.

The results are good already for providers like YouTube, which says Indian usage has soared, outpacing global peers, thanks to mobile traffic which more than doubled last year.

“Traditional film and TV content still continues to drive massive watch time while studio-made songs, movies and clips continue to be some of the most popular content nationwide,”said Gautam Anand, YouTube’s Asia Pacific director of operations.

LIGHTS, CAMERA … CASH!

The hope is that cheap, convenient content, perhaps 25 rupees (37 US cents) for a movie streamed to your phone, will make piracy redundant.

Of course, getting cash out of the consumer remains a challenge, and subscription is an untested model.

“In the US, everybody has been paying for content but in India people don’t pay as easily,” said Gaurav Gandhi, chief operating officer of Viacom18, a venture between US group Viacom and Reliance.

Indians feel they pay for data, so the content should be free, he says.

But the growing use of phones as credit cards, to pay for small purchases, will help.

So too, say industry insiders, will unique content.

“We have to come up with our own model and a large part of that would rest in creating unique content for online,” said Radhika Kapoor, head of content Fox Star studios India that runs the Hotstar streaming platform.

Others argue the secret will be ad-driven content, that can be provided free. Indeed, getting users to stay loyal to one platform to leverage subscription revenue might be challenging, but getting advertisers interested is not.

Global advertising spends on digital media is likely to grow to 36 per cent by 2020 compared with 21 per cent in 2010, and consultancy Deloitte’s Hemant Joshi says India will lead the trend with digital ad spending likely to grow more than 400 per cent to 354 billion rupees ($5.3 billion) in the next five years.

“We have seen that advertisers get better reach through mobiles in India simply because there are more phones than TV screens,” Joshi says.

“That will only multiply.”

Guo Boxiong, a former senior military leader, will be charged with corruption, China announced on Tuesday while pressing ahead with its anti-graft campaign.

Investigations by military prosecutors found that Guo, who was vice-chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission before retiring in 2012, collected bribes for arranging promotions for others, Xinhua News Agency said.

Guo’s case is being handed over for prosecution now that the investigation is completed, Xinhua said.

The military procuratorate said that the amount of bribes Guo is charged with taking was “huge”, although it didn’t release the amount, and it said the 74-year-old had confessed during the investigation.

A commentary on the Chinese Ministry of Defence website said on Tuesday that the military must take the necessary steps to build discipline and remove internal malaise. The practice of military law and discipline should be “merciless”, it said.

Guo was expelled from the Communist Party of China in July.

Under the Chinese Criminal Procedure Law, military prosecutors will hand over the case to the country’s military court. Authorities will deal with Guo’s family members and others implicated in the case without tolerance, said a statement from the military procuratorate.

Guo’s son, Guo Zhenggang, who was a major general, was put under investigation for corruption in February last year.

Since March last year, dozens of military officials have been exposed for allegedly violating discipline and laws, as part of the country’s drive in recent years to root out corruption in the military.

Xu Caihou, another senior military official who served with Guo as vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, was probed in March 2014 for allegedly taking “massive” bribes. Xu died of bladder cancer in March last year.

President Xi Jinping has made it a key goal to weed out corruption in the military. A number of high-level corruption cases have since been exposed.

In August, after Guo was put under investigation, Defence Minister Chang Wanquan pledged intensified efforts to run the army with “strict discipline and in line with the law”.

Yangon – The retired junta general who steered Myanmar’s last five years of reforms has temporarily become a monk, according to state media, days after he ceded power to a new government led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy party.

Pictures widely shared on social media showed a shaven-headed Thein Sein wearing his trademark spectacles and draped in the deep maroon robes of the Buddhist clergy.

Myanmar language state newspaper Myanma Alinn said he had entered a monastery in the central town of Pyin Oo Lwin on Monday for a five day stint, taking the monk title “U Thandidamma”.

“Those close to U Thein Sein said he will practice meditation during a temporary monkhood of about five days,” the paper said.

It added that he had promised Buddhist elders he would be ordained as a monk once he finished his role as president.

Spending periods in the monkhood is common for Buddhist men in Myanmar, where young boys are expected to spend at least three days as novices in monasteries during their childhood.

Thein Sein, a former junta general, led Myanmar’s quasi-civilian transitional government through five stunning years of reform, as the nation opened up to the world after decades of repressive and isolating army rule.

Only a few years earlier the junta led a violent crackdown on largely monk-led protests that were dubbed the “Saffron Revolution”.

The unobtrusive 70-year-old handed power to Suu Kyi and her proxy president Htin Kyaw last week.

While not in parliament he is expected to continue to lead his army-backed party, now in opposition after Suu Kyi’s party won landmark November polls in a landslide.