The child servants of India - New York Times
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The child servants of India </b>
By Amelia Gentleman International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2005
NEW DELHI Affordable, docile, easy to have around the house. Child workers have become a popular solution for India's new yuppies, as working parents search for cheap staff to help them juggle their professional and domestic responsibilities.
Traffickers have established a lucrative network of employment agencies, recruiting large numbers of children from impoverished rural villages to work as cleaners, maids and nannies for a flourishing generation of newly rich city professionals.
The practice is one of the darker side effects of India's economic development. As more middle-class women take up full-time work, the number of families where both parents work is rising. Traditional extended families are rapidly being replaced by nuclear units, with no grandmothers on hand to baby-sit, intensifying the need for help at home.
In New Delhi, it is not difficult to hire a child domestic worker. Visit any of the 700-odd placement agencies and ask for someone to help out at home and the response is straightforward.
"Do you want a lady or a girl?" said Harish Munjal of Munjal Services, an agency based in Lajpath Nagar, a middle-class residential area of New Delhi.
The Indian government has done much to curb the use of child labor in sweatshops, but the recruitment of children as servants is not seen as a major problem. There is no law preventing employers from hiring child workers in their homes, nor is there any social stigma attached to the practice.
<b>As well as being cheap, girls aged between 10 and 18 are seen as "more docile and less demanding" than their adult counterparts, according to a Save the Children UK report, "Child Domestic Work."</b>
<b>Save the Children recently started a campaign in India seeking support for a ban on the employment of servants 18 and younger. The charity estimates that India has as many as five million child domestic workers, although the unregulated nature of the business means that there are no reliable figures.</b>
"More and more urban families are employing children to work in their homes," said Brian Heidel, the Indian program director for Save the Children. "It is disappointing that these people, who have high levels of education and good incomes, do not recognize this as something that is not acceptable in modern society."
Meena Kumari, aged somewhere between 10 and 14, lives in a shelter for rescued child workers in New Delhi after the police removed her from employers who were abusing her. Last year, an elderly lady working for an employment agency took her from her village in the eastern India to work in New Delhi.
"I was nervous but my parents needed the money to build themselves a new hut," she said in an interview.
Meena said she was reassured by the fact that the woman, a familiar face in the village, had already taken several other girls to work in New Delhi.
She ended up working for a middle-class family in a suburb, looking after two children and cleaning.
"The children were the same age as me," she said. "I had to make their beds for them, iron their clothes and prepare their lunchboxes. If I made a mistake I was slapped, and my ear was twisted until it bled. The mother pulled my hair and beat me with a sandal."
An agent took her 600 rupees monthly salary, or $13, and promised to send it to her family, but it never arrived. Two cases - one against her employers and the other against the agent - are making their way through the courts.
Rita Panicker, director of Butterflies, which operates the shelter where Meena lives, said her case was typical of the five or six children that the shelter helps every month.
"The agents are very unscrupulous," she said. "They tell the parents that the child will be staying in a very nice home, be well-fed and sent to school. They make up all sorts of lies. Usually the child never gets the money promised."
"Sometimes the children are as young as seven or eight," Panicker said. "The families say they want to employ someone as a 'playmate' for their children. But they aren't playing, they're working. If a child is small you can order it around and make it work very hard, and they don't know how to protest."
<b>Activists recognize the difficulties involved in trying to persuade Indian society that the practice should be outlawed.</b> A few state administrations have banned officials from recruiting children to work for them as home helpers, but there is no nationwide legislation and no popular support for the introduction of a ban.
India's Child Labor Prevention Act prohibits the employment of children under the age of 14 in "hazardous occupations," but domestic labor is not seen as hazardous. Chandra Reejonia, a spokesman for the Department of Women and Child Development, said efforts were under way to change this.
"We are doing our best," he said. "The list of hazardous occupations is being expanded every year."
When asked, most employers say that they are rescuing young rural girls from desperate poverty, providing them with a better lifestyle, treating them like daughters and generally performing a commendable act of charity.
"It is true that some will experience an improvement in the quality of their lives, we can't deny that, " <b>Heidel of Save the Children said. "But our research shows that over half of them report some form of abuse - physical or sexual</b>. <b>The pay and the hours are appalling, as are their working conditions, the treatment meted out to them and the humiliating language used towards them</b>. Children are inherently vulnerable when they are taken to live and work in someone else's home."
Ranjana Sardar, 17, laughed at the idea that her employers might have been acting charitably toward her. She worked for a series of families in Calcutta since she was 12 or 13, after her father, an agricultural worker in the eastern state of West Bengal, was no longer able to support the family.
"In my first job, I started work at around five in the morning, did all the housework and looked after the two-year-old girl while her parents were at work," she said. "I also had to look after the elderly grandmother, which meant I slept on the floor by her bed at night."
Her employers, who both worked at a bank, paid her 300 rupees a month - the minimum wage in New Delhi is 2,800 rupees.
"The family were well-off, they had their own house," she said. "They could have afforded to pay me better, but they didn't always feed me properly, and I missed out on my education."
<b>Heidel said that the organization's campaign was not about imposing Western values on India.</b> <i>(So treating children humanely is a western value, unknown to Pagan Hindus?)</i>
"This is regarded as an unacceptable abuse of childhood all over the world, not just in the West," he said. "Society globally has reflected on this issue of using children as domestic workers, and has recognized that this is a practice which is not acceptable in modern society. "<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
(1)
There is no forced Labor in the world's greatest Democracy
(2) I suppport death penalty for those who traffic young girls (and boys) for prostitution. But Child Servants, though highly undesirable& immoral, are an economic need - a supply and demand function of a capitalist economy. Charles Dickens wrote a lot about the London Slums which were full of little children with blackened faces from factory soot - that was at the time of England's Industrial Revolution. Child Labor was also used in United States at the time of their Industrialization (1920s). It is still used in China, India and most of the third world today. As India's economic situation improves and Home Appliances replace human labor this problem (along with active government intervention) will also disappear.
(3) Re: The British Charity - The very people who took Indian (children included) to Malaysia, Trinidad, Kenya, South Africa and Guyana as indentured servants are now giving us lectures on how a poor country should manage, what is essentially an economic problem, not a societal sanction for "child labor"
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