As a resident Indian, as far as I know (a) children have a guaranteed right to education which keeps them in school until 14 (b) children in fabric sweatshops was never an Indian thing. Children in brick kilns and beedi factories rolling beedis because of their nimble fingers used to be a thing.
As of 2021, India had an estimated 160 million child laborers. Children in textile factories is absolutely a thing. Look up Sumangali scheme for just one example.
Wiki says there are 200 million odd child labourers globally. As per the Indian census of 2011, the number of child labourers in India is way lower than your 160 M figure.
India’s census figures are mostly reliable, unlikely to be off by an order of magnitude.
As per this link, there are 1.8 billion children globally (i.e. below 14). India has roughly 250 Million children so around 14% of the world population of children.
There are roughly 250 million child laborers globally of which 11 million are Indian children so around 4.4% of the global child labor population is Indian.
I.e., despite having 14% of the world's kids, only 4.4% are child laborers. I'd say India is moving in the right direction when it comes to child welfare.
So, having abandoned your points A and B above, your new point is that being that there are countries with worse child labour problems, India is moving in the right direction?
None of the quoted stats or linked articles support the assertion that things are improving. The only trend that I can see noted is that Indian child labourers are moving to the cities to do manufacturing work and abandoning rural/agriculture work which on the face of it doesn't seem like a fully positive development development all.
I don't think the GP is speaking to Kenyans wearing Indian-manufactured clothes -- I think that they're pointing out the hypocrisy in Time readers (and its authors) who live in highly-developed countries, wearing clothing made by low-wage workers, who are just looking for any reason to criticize OpenAI, without applying that same criticism to themselves.
Ah yeah, the classic “in order to criticize a thing, you must first criticize and root out every possible worse thing.”
People have no way of knowing where the things they buy come from or how to source things ethically unless people write articles like this and push for higher standards when they see an opportunity.
It’s one thing to protect genuinely well-meaning people who can’t meet a purity standard, but OpenAI has a track record of dishonesty (starting with their name).
> People have no way of knowing where the things they buy come from
I don't know about other places and maybe I'm an outlier but I check everything for where it's produced / manufactured. Most if not all items in the US are required to have where the item was produced/manufactured. Some may say "Manufactured in the US with globally sourced material" makes it harder to pin down where each of the components originated from. Clothes and other items the country of origin is on the tag.
It's another instance of the same problem -- that wealthy western society and it's trappings rely on ensuring that there is a set of poor people who will jump at the opportunity to be exploited
