36 Million Slave Labour

Nearly 36 million people worldwide, or 0.5% of the world's population, live as slaves, a survey by anti-slavery campaign group Walk Free says. India has the most slaves overall and Mauritania has the highest percentage. In 2012, the International Labour Organisation estimated that almost 21 million people were victims of forced labour.

The report defines slaves as people subject to forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking, sexual exploitation for money and forced or servile marriage. It uses slavery in a modern sense of the term, rather than as a reference to the broadly outlawed traditional practice where people were held in bondage and treated as another person's property.

According to the report, more than 14 million people live as slaves in India. Next in the index comes China, with more than 3 million slaves, followed by Pakistan, Uzbekistan. Russia is ranked fifth. The country's economy is said to rely on enslaved migrant workers in the construction and agricultural sectors.

Mauritania meanwhile has the highest number of slaves as a proportion of the population, at 4%. Many people in the African country inherit their slave status from their ancestors.

Child labour has been reported in all the major cotton growing countries - China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Uzbekistan and Turkey. Many household-name retailers concede they do not know exactly how the cotton they use is farmed and processed. Yet, for years, labour activists here have campaigned for their help. Usually companies track their supply chain to the spinning mills, while high street retailers track back to their immediate suppliers. Little or no scrutiny is made of the ginning factories and cotton fields.

Top five countries with the highest proportion of slaves

Mauritania - 4%

Uzbekistan - 3.97%

Haiti - 2.3%

Qatar - 1.36%

India - 1.14%