THE MONETISED CHILDHOOD: BRINGING ‘KIDFLUENCERS’ UNDER THE AMBIT OF INDIA’S CHILD LABOUR LAWS

India’s child labour framework was built to police factories, mines, and film sets, not a bedroom converted into a studio by a smartphone and a ring light. This paper examines whether children who are the principal earners of monetised YouTube channels, Instagram pages, and family vlogs, colloquially “kidfluencers”, fall within, or through, India’s child protection architecture. It argues that the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986 already contains a statutory analogue, the audio-visual entertainment proviso in Section 3(2)(b), together with 2017 Rules mandating District Magistrate authorisation and an earnings deposit, that has never been extended to platform-based content creation. Using doctrinal and comparative methodology, the paper situates this gap within Articles 15(3), 21, 21A, 23, and 24 of the Constitution, examines the “unconscionable gains” clause of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, and evaluates the limits of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Drawing on trust-account models in California and Illinois, France’s authorisation model, and the European Union’s data-protection architecture, it proposes a calibrated Indian framework and concludes that extension, rather than wholesale new legislation, is the most constitutionally sound and feasible path.