The rapid growth of India's digital economy has provided opportunities in new areas of economic activity, but at the same time has opened up new uncharted territories of exploiting children that the existing legal frameworks are ill-equipped to address. This paper makes a doctrinal critique of the Indian existing legislative structure on regulatory aspects of Child Labour including the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986 (as amended in 2016), the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, the Information Technology Act, 2000 and others in order to examine the adequacy of such legislation to respond to emerging forms of exploitation of children that are manifesting in the form of child influencer labour, gig economy micro-tasking, online sexual exploitation, creation of digital content, and algorithmic targeting Through an analysis of the provisions of the statute, judicial pronouncements, international obligations under ILO Conventions No. 138 & 182 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, comparative frameworks of the European Union and the United States, the paper argues that due to the concepts of three fundamental doctrinal deficiencies, that is, definitional rigidity, jurisdictional ambiguity and enforcement asymmetry that are present in India's legal framework which are detrimental to the enforcement of labour laws. The paper concludes with recommendations for legislative reform and regulatory innovation for the creation of a rights-protective legal architecture that suits the realities of the twenty-first century digital economy.
KUMAR et al. (Sun,) studied this question.