As poverty and caste-bound tradition continue to stalk rural India, as many as 15 million children, some as young as 6, continue to work as bonded laborers in violation of national and international law, a new human-rights report says.
"Debt bondage in India is endemic and widespread," says the report released Monday by the New York-based group Human Rights Watch. "Largely due to economic necessity, children either work alongside their bonded families or are sold individually into what amounts to slavery."The report estimates 10 million to 15 million child workers in India are owned by their employers, mainly in small-scale industries that produce hand-rolled cigarettes, silver jewelry, silk, leather shoes and carpets.
An estimated 50 million more children work freely in India.
"Whether they are sweating in the heat of stone quarries, working in the fields 16 hours a day, picking rags in city streets, or hidden away as domestic servants, these children endure miserable and difficult lives," the report says.
Human Rights Watch blames the Indian government for adminstrative lethargy and official corruption in failing to enforce its own 20-year-old Bonded Labor (Abolition) Act, and allowing "employers throughout the country continue to purchase children as virtual slave labor in agriculture and a wide range of industries."
During a two-month investigation in India, the group found that in the hand-rolled cigarette, or beedi, industry, a child could be bought for about $45. The child would remain bonded to the employer and be required to roll an average of 1,500 beedis a day, until the debt was repaid, which could take about six months.
"They are required to work constantly and at a rapid pace; if they work slowly, talk to another child, or make a mistake in their work they will be severely scolded and possibly beaten by their employer, and pay may be deducted from their wages," the report says.
The sale of a child in South Asia often occurs when destitute parents face a bad harvest, a sudden death in the family or onerous dowry and have no other source for emergency cash. The report found that girls, mostly from the bottom tiers of India's caste hierarchy, tend to become bonded laborers more than boys, and tend to be put to work in the most physically demanding and lowest-paying industries, such as rock-breaking.
In India's fast-growing silk-handloom industries, which receive financial aid from the World Bank and several United Nations organizations, children often enter the workforce between the ages of 6 and 9, first serving as assistants to adult master weavers.
Although slavery has been recorded in India for at least 1,500 years, a succession of modern Indian governments has vowed to end the practice. However, the Human Rights Watch investigation found "endemic apathy" and corruption among bureaucrats charged with eradicating bonded labor.
"It is possible to end child servitude," the report says. "The only thing lacking is the will."
It credits India's four-month-old coalition government under Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda for pledging to eradicate child labor and introduce free compulsory elementary education. The previous government of former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, himself a high-caste Brahmin and member of a wealthy land-owning family, had committed itself only to eliminating child labor in hazardous industries by the year 2000.
Human Rights Watch also criticizes two of India's neighbors, Pakistan and Nepal, for allowing the practice of bonded child labor to continue. However, it cautions that too much concern in the West has focused on South Asia's carpet industries, which employ relatively few children.
The report estimates that while 300,000 children work in India's carpet industry, the majority of whom it says are bonded, the number represents only 2 percent of the country's bonded child workers.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)