Several important references to caste discrimination are included in the Core Labour Standards in India report for the WTO September review of India’s trade policies, released by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
In a letter to Hillary Clinton, HRW urged her to raise with India the need to protect the rights of women, Dalits, and other vulnerable groups. HRW mention specific steps to ensure the protection and promotion of Dalit Rights that need to be discussed with the Indian administration.
ILO: For millions of people, contemporary India has become a land of opportunities, and the largest democracy in the world has experienced a remarkable economic growth during the last decade. Yet, as India accelerates its pace towards development, many are left behind due to long standing caste-based discrimination in employment. ILO Online reports from Rajasthan, India.
Imagine sitting in your home, it’s ten o´clock in the morning, and you suddenly see a bulldozer, with its jaws wide open, drive up to your front door. You are told that you have thirty minutes to collect your belongings and get out of the family home you have lived in for decades, before it is completely destroyed, reduced to a worthless pile of rubble.
In a bold speech on the 17 June at the Conference of the State Welfare and Social Justice Ministers in New Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged ministers to be more vigilant and do everything in their power to implement the SC/ST act that is meant to protect the human rights of Dalits and Adivasis. The PM paid particular attention to the on-going issue of manual scavenging which he called, “One of the darkest blots on our development process” saying,
The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) and the Housing and Land Rights Network in India have sent out a press release calling for the state and central government to act on an imminent threat of force and violence directed towards Dalit villagers. The villagers have been peacefully protesting the take over of their land by the Korean based POSCO steel production company, threatening their livelihoods. Despite protests being non-violent, the police have been terrorising the villagers and threatening them and the press release describes a tense situation where it is feared that the Dalit villagers may face brute force and false charges from the police.
The National Human Rights Commission in India has directed the Tamil Nadu government to compensate five Dalit human rights defenders who were unlawfully arrested in August 2010. The Commission has held that the police officers have committed grave human rights violations against the victims, and that it is a case fit for payment of compensation to the victims. The five human rights defenders were trainees at People’s Watch Tamil Nadu and where on a fact finding mission regarding allegations of torture. The NHRC has also found that the torture allegations they were investigating were true.
Multinational clothing brands are sourcing from cotton spinning mills in Tamil Nadu that exploit teenage girls, subjecting them to what the ILO terms the ‘worst forms of child labour’.
India is failing to address its farmer suicide crisis, says the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), in a report released yesterday that has indentified an agrarian crisis in India where farmer suicides are on the rise and caste discrimination only exacerbates the problem.
Even a Dalit millionaire in India can’t buy a house for his mother in the ‘upper caste’ part of her village, or see his son marry an ‘upper caste’ girl. Despite the economic success of a small fraction of India’s Dalits, discrimination prevails and a top economist argues that in fact discrimination and repression are what underpin India’s economic growth, forcing the majority of Dalits into low paid and insecure labour situations.
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