Almost thirty years ago, a boy named Iqbal Masih was shot dead near Lahore. He was twelve, the age most children should be in school, not running from factory owners and debt collectors.

Iqbal had escaped bonded labour in a carpet factory and begun speaking out against child exploitation. His courage made him a symbol of hope. His murder made him a symbol of our silence.

We remember him now and then, mostly in speeches or school assemblies, but rarely in action. Three decades later, millions of children in Pakistan still work in factories, fields and homes. We have learnt to look away and convenience has made us complicit.

We pass them every day: a boy carrying bricks on a construction site, a girl washing dishes in someone else’s kitchen, a child at a traffic signal wiping windshields. They’re everywhere and invisible at the same time. We see them, but we don’t see them.

Child labour isn’t just a symptom of poverty; it’s a feature of how our economy works. Families don’t send their children to work because they don’t care about education. They send them because they can’t afford not to. When a father earns barely enough for food, a son’s daily wages, however small, can mean survival. It’s a cruel arithmetic – one meal or one day of........

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