The overall socio-economic development strategy of Bangladesh has become a model for many third world countries. Today‟s Children will be acting as the driving force of the development strategy for tomorrow. The very achievement towards developing our children and making them worthy for a modern and independent nation is not satisfactory. After the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent country, the Children Act‟ 1974 was enacted imbued with the spirit of great liberation war which paved the way in formulating National Children Policy‟1994, undertaking many development projects in this regard including the National Action Plan for Children‟ 2005-2010. Bangladesh has become the partner of many international, regional and bilateral declarations with ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and other major child labour related conventions of International Labour Organization (ILO). The said measures and subsequent steps in this regard along with the sincere effort of the Government, successful tripartite consultation between Government, employers and workers, led to the withdrawal of working children from the Ready Made Garments (RMG) industry and that the image of Bangladesh was upheld a lot in the international arena. Even then, a substantive portion of children and adolescents in Bangladesh remain engaged in hazardous work. Child labour still prevails in agriculture and other informal sectors. The very situation of Child Labour is absolutely undesirable for a nation like Bangladesh. The world is changing in a faster pace with having remarkable development of science and technology and with the emergence of welfare state initiating substantial changes in social life and existing values. To maintain the equilibrium along with these changes, pragmatic policies, rules and regulations are being formulated in parallel to the amendment of existing laws. In the context of transition of social life and values, a social consensus is required to save the traditional values from decaying as well as adapting the adjusted values to mitigate the demand of time as well as to accommodate the values created in response to historical changes with affection and empathy. The said social consensus and renewed policies virtually regulates the social control and mode of changes.
It became the unanimous demand of Government, Non-Governmental Organization (NGOs) and the civil society at large to have a timely policy to move the existing child labour situation towards a positive direction. Within this backdrop, the Child Labour Elimination Policy‟2010 came into force with having incorporated necessary elements extracted from
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different events and incidents happened in recent national, regional and global level in socio-economic, cultural and geo-political arenas. The existing laws and regulations related to child and child labour will be gradually integrated into this policy, and it will be considered as the determinant and standard instrument while enacting and amending laws and formulating rules and regulations on child and child labour issues in public and private sector.