New Dehli, India ? A ban on child labor took effect Tuesday, but at roadside food stalls across New Delhi, many of the boys and girls who serve glasses of hot tea, wash dishes and take out trash were not celebrating.

The children of India’s tens of millions of poor families are expected to work, and in many cases they are the sole breadwinners.

“As it is, I barely make enough to survive,” said 12-year-old Dinesh Kumar, who has been doing odd jobs since coming to New Delhi three years ago from a village in eastern India. “This will be a bad blow. I really don’t know what I’ll do.”

The new law bans hiring children younger than 14 as servants in homes or as workers in restaurants, tea shops, hotels and spas.

Despite the subcontinent’s emerging economic power, child labor remains widespread in India. Conservative estimates place the number of children covered by the new law at 256,000. All told, an estimated 13 million children work in India, many of them in hazardous industries, such as glass making, where such labor has long been banned.

Officials say the new law will take children out of the workplace and put them in school.

At one roadside tea shop, the Harish Dhaba, talk among the child workers focused on the hardships of the new ban.

“As long as I can remember I’ve worked in a restaurant, washing dishes, cutting vegetables, throwing out the garbage,” said Rama Chandran, 13, as he cleared dishes from grimy wooden tables in the tiny, smoke-filled eatery.

He has been working in New Delhi for nearly four years and said the money he sends home to his widowed mother and three younger siblings in southern India is crucial to their survival. “If I didn’t send money home, they would starve,” Rama said.

Employers who violate the new child labor law face up to a year in prison and a fine of $217, and officials are promising strict enforcement.

Rights activists criticize the law, saying it does not address the root causes of child labor or provide any kind of safety net for children put out of work.

“The fundamental reason is abject poverty – that is the most important and fundamental issue why children are laboring,” said Rita Panicker, who leads Butterflies, a non-governmental organization that works with street children.

“Bans and prohibitions will help if you put preventive mechanisms and rehabilitation mechanisms in place,” she said. “If you don’t do either and just ban children from working … the children will be the ones who will be the victims of more oppression and exploitation.”