ICN/ SOMO report ‘Captured by Cotton’ >>  Dalit girls working under slave like conditions in India’s garment industry: Multinational clothing brands are sourcing from cotton spinning mills in Tamil Nadu that use teenage girls who are exploited and subjected to what the ILO terms the ‘worst forms of child labour’. The girls are not offered fair wages and work towards a promise of being paid a lump sum of withheld wages, after three years employment. The scheme is called the ‘Sumangali Scheme’ and it is not uncommon that at the end of the three years the girls are not paid and have effectively been used as slaves.These are some of the key findings in the report by the India Committee of the Netherlands (ICN) and the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO). (May 2011)

The report, Every Thirty Minutes: Farmer Suicides, Human Rights, and the Agrarian Crisis in India, released by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) and the The International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) looks critically at India’s farmer suicide epidemic. A quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years—an average of one suicide every 30 minutes and Dalits are particularly hard hit. (April 2011)