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Links: press, slavery

IDSN’s documentation database

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104 entries found

Nepal workers look to Gulf to escape forced-labour system (Al Jazeera)

"According to a 2013 report (PDF) on forced labour in Nepal’s agriculture sector, published by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), an overwhelming 95 percent of households employed in the haruwa-charuwa system are victims of forced labour. Nepal’s Dalit community, the lowest group in the complex Hindu caste system, is the most exploited in the haruwa-charuwa system. Discriminated in every sphere of their lives, poor Dalits fall prey to debt traps laid by landlords belonging to the privileged castes. The haruwa-charuwa labourers often toil from morning to dusk during the peak agricultural season, but receive minimum compensation for their work."

Child marriage and child labour: Slavery is not dead in sugarcane (COUNTERVIEW.ORG)

In August 2020, Global March Against Child Labour released an evidence-based report, providing an overview of the situation of child labour with a gender lens in sugarcane harvesting in India. The report highlights that children are pushed into hazardous child labour due to structural poverty among harvesters, most of whom are from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, also referred to as DBA (Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi/Tribal) in this article, because of exploitative hiring practices resulting in debt bondage. It was found that traditional gender-based norms contributed significantly to child labour by normalising unequal wages and unpaid family work.

COVID-19 poses new risks to India’s enslaved waste pickers (Thomson Reuters)

Indian waste pickers are struggling to obtain information or equipment to inform and protect them during the coronavirus pandemic. Thomson Reuters has run this article by IDSN Ambassador Aidan McQuade and IDSN’s Ritwajit Das, looking at the current challenges faced by Dalit waste pickers in India. While this article looks at India, similar situations are found in other South Asian countries.

Towards Dawn: Combating Contemporary Forms of Slavery in Brick Kilns (Different Truths, 2016)

Lenin takes us through the sordid and macabre accounts of contemporary slavery in brick kilns, based on actual accounts of the hapless victims. Driven by hunger and starvation, many children die of malnutrition. When the bonded labourers ask for money for the treatment of sick children, they are beaten up, blue-black. Children die, young girls and women are sexually exploited. People cannot escape the debt traps and clutches of the brick kiln owners. They are hounded. Police are hand-in- gloves with the brick kiln owners. Against all odds, his organisation, Peoples’ Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), has stood up for the cause of the Dalit and Musahar victims. There is a new dawn of dignity and identity for hopeless victims. Here’s a special story, an in-depth report to combat and resolve the problems, on the occasion of May Day by Different Truths (DT) and PVCHR.