India’s forced labor problem

Rankings aside, human trafficking remains a problem in India and for countries around the globe.

As a hidden crime, statistics are difficult to come by, but in its analysis of Indian cases, the State Department found that 90% of human trafficking involves exploitation of Indians within the country’s borders, and that it is home to a significant amount of forced labour. Adults and children alike are coerced through debt and sexual violence—including rape—into working in brick kilns, rice mills, agriculture, and embroidery factories.

The poorest and the ‘lowest castes’ appear to be the most vulnerable, the report noted, and children are also “subjected to forced labour as factory workers, domestic servants, beggars, agricultural workers, and, to a lesser extent, in some areas of rural Uttar Pradesh, as carpet weavers.”

But sex trafficking involving women and girls from India, Nepal, and Bangladesh also thrives in India. In particular, religious pilgrimage centres and cities popular for tourism sometimes facilitate child sex tourism, the report stated.

The circumstances are not benign, said Baumann of Free the Slaves, which works in 350 communities in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “It’s not just working long days and not getting paid,” she explained. “There is serious violence being used against them.”

During a Monday briefing on the TIP report, Lou C. Baca, the Ambassador-at-Large for the Office To Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, described a case involving a deaf Mexican boy who was lured to New York City with photos of the Statue of Liberty and who was then forced to beg for change on the subway or face beatings.  Clinton also described meeting a Cambodian girl at a shelter for trafficking victims who had been sold into a brothel as a small child. When she tried to fight her way out of her situation, her trafficker stabbed her in one eye with a nail.