Bill Newton Dunn (ALDE). – Mr President, I was a member of the EP delegation that went to India last month. A small group of us went, and it was exceedingly interesting and very valuable to go.

I want to talk, in particular, about paragraph 29 of the motion on which we will vote on Wednesday. It says that Parliament ‘welcomes all efforts by the Indian Government to eradicate child labour’. I suppose the person who drafted this is attacking goods that might be manufactured using child labour and brought into Europe, but the motion does not say that. What it does is single out one of the unfortunate aspects of Indian life which still exists. Last year, our delegation visited a project in southern India, which is financed by EU money, to eliminate child labour. From what we saw, the problem was that children were actually working in the fields – not manufacturing anything – to pay off debts that their parents had incurred. They were sentenced to do this for life and to miss out on schooling.

The phrase used in the motion for a resolution is potentially offensive to Indians. Of course they want to eliminate child labour. We should either get rid of paragraph 29 or change it to say that we are concerned about goods that might be made using child labour. For me, there is a whiff of superiority here, with Europe saying: ‘We have got rid of child labour, but you Indians are still using it’. That is not the relationship we should have with a very important trading partner.