Domestic Slavery

The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are at least four million domestic servants in India, including about 100,000 children working in and around Delhi. While it has been illegal to employ anyone under the age of 14 since 2006, that has done little to hinder the placement agencies which routinely hire out trafficked children.

A good maid might earn 3,500 rupees (£43) a month, if she is very lucky, or about half the legal minimum wage for an unskilled worker in Delhi. The less fortunate are bought from brokers and kept as unpaid skivvies – simply fed and given somewhere to sleep. A company called Domestic Help in India is one of thousands of agencies supplying staff. Based in Gurgaon, near Delhi, the company charges employers 16,000 rupees to arrange the hire of a maid for 11 months. Its website is packed with adverts for staff, who can be selected on the basis of age (15 and upwards), religion and gender. Gurpreet, a maid/cook, has two years' experience and costs 3,000 rupees a month. Harjett, who has one year's experience, is available to anyone in Delhi for just 2,000 rupees a month. Many children are trafficked from poor states such as Bihar and West Bengal through the thousands of illegal agencies operating in the cities. Last year the movement raided a placement agency to rescue six girls and uncovered evidence of 400 girls who had been trafficked.

Patricia Lone of Unicef says domestic labour is one of the most dangerous forms of child labour because of the potential for abuse, particularly for girls. "It is a huge problem in most countries in south Asia because of the levels of poverty." Sometimes it is parents unable to support their children who pack them off to work; other times it is the children themselves who seek to pay their own way, she says. "But it is related to poverty, which forces parents and children to put themselves at risk."

Bhuwan Ribhu, national secretary of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement), said child labour was now common in the cities, particularly involving girls aged 12 to 18, while boys aged 10 and upwards are more common in the countryside. "India cannot and must not grow at the cost of millions of childhoods," he said. Ribhu says people cannot resist a cheap deal. "Well educated or not, people try to maximise their profits by employing kids. They do not pay proper wages. The probability of children leaving employment whenever they want is very low, and they may be exploited, beaten and made to work long hours," he said. "Children work because they are the cheapest form of labour, and in these situations they are victims of slavery. They are abused, not only economically but physically and sexually, as the exploiters also have little fear of law enforcement," he said.