Child Labour : Various Forms of Child Labour
Domestic Service Children in domestic servitude may well be the most vulnerable and exploited children of all, as well as the most difficult to protect. They are often extremely poorly paid or not paid at all, terms and conditions depend on whims and fancies of their employees and take no account of their legal rights; they are deprived of schooling, play and social activity, and emotional support from friends and family. They are vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. (MENTION EARLIER CITED CASES OF INDIA Ref SAACS).
The isolationism makes it difficult to discuss exact numbers. Local surveys have however reflected on the gravity of the problem.
A survey of middle income household in Colombo showed that are in three had a child under 14 yrs as domestic worker.
A survey of domestic workers in Uruguay found that 34% had begun working before they were 14.
A survey in India noting that 17% of domestic however were under 15 years old, reported that girls aged 12 to 15 were the preferred choice of 90% of employing households.
Even when not sexually abused, child domestic can suffer severe damage psychological, & social.
Force and Bonded LabourMany children find themselves in effective slavery. In South Asia, this has taken on a quasi – institutional form known as ‘bonded’ child labour under this system, children often only 8 or 9 yrs old are pledged by their parents to factory owners or their agents in exchange for small loans.
In India, this type of transaction is wide spread in agriculture, as well as industries such as cigarette – rolling, carpet – making, matchstick – making, slate and silk. The most notorious of these is the carpet industry of Mirzapur – Bhadohi – Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.
Most, most - exploited children belong to the most marginalized segments of society.
Though this kind of virtual child slavery is usually associated only with India, Nepal and Pakistan, it exists in other parts as well
In Brazil, forced labour is found from charcoal burning projects to sugar care estates.
A tradition for generations, servitude was officially outlanded in 1980, but 400,000 black Africans save as slaves, formally or informally.
In Myanmar, thousands including children work on construction projects.
In Nepal, children and women carry bricks on their heads from the brick field to a truck they earn $0.25 for every 100 trips.
Commercial Sexual Exploitation The underground nature of the multi-billion dollar illegal industry, makes it difficult to gather reliable data, but NGOs in the field estimate that each year at least 1 million girls world wide are lured or forced into their form of labour. Boys are not left out either.
A part from sex – tourism, in which people from rich countries travel to locations like Brazil, Thailand, Goa in India in search of sex with children, thousands of young girls in numerous countries serve the sexual appetites of local people as well.
In the US, at least 100,000 children are believed to be involved.
Direct links between commercial sexual exploitation and other form of exploitative labour is clear. Nepalese carpet factories where 50% workers are children are common sites of sexual exploitation.
In addition to people to buy sex, there are traffickers, agents and intermediaries – professional criminals and syndicates who run portholes.
Beyond these direct actors, are deeply rested gender discriminations that blunt perceptions of violence.
Global market forces have also contributed, by widening the gap between the rich and the poor: - encouraging migration, destabilizing families, destroying support systems and safety nets.
Conflicts and was also create conditions in which children are sexually exploited.
Industrial and Plantation Work In the glass bangle industry in Firozabad, India one quarter of the workforce, around 50,000 children are under 14.
All over the world children work in hazardous conditions. This industries include leather working in the Naples (Italy) to pre industrial brick making of Columbia and Peru, which can involve children as young as eight.
Children are exploited in mining operations – e.g. diamond and gold mines of Cote d’Ivoire and South Africa, coal mines in Columbia.
Children have work with barest minimum of safety equipment. Respiratory problems are rampant – tuberculosis, bronchitis and asthma.
Children working in earthen ware and porcelain factories are unprotected from silica dust. In the lock industry they inhale noxious fumes. Similarly in the glassware industry.
The number of children exploited by plantation agriculture across the world are as great. E.g. Sugar plantations in Brazil, exposed to snake-bites, risking muitilation while working on the machinery, flower export farms in Colombia, young people are exposed to pesticides banned in industrialized countries.
In Africa children work on various plantations cocoa, coffee, tea and sisal
In Indonesia, children mostly girl work a tobacco plantations for $0.60 a day. Children are also employed in tea plantations of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, in sugar cane and rubber plantations of Thailand.
While much of this industrial and plantation work is carried out by national subcontractors. Some of it is overseen by transnational corporations whose products find their way into the stores and homes of the west.
Street Work
In contrast to child domestic work children also work in visible places – hawking in markets, and darting in and out of traffic jams, plying trade in buses and trains etc
The street is a cruel and hazardous workplace. They can be murdered by organised crime, by other young people or even by the police, as happened in Rio de Janerio in 1993 when police officers massacred six street children. A repeat from the slate juvenile court stated that, on average, three street children are killed every day in Rio.
Children working in the streets come very often from slums and squatter settlements.
Their numbers have increased in places experiencing armed conflicts, like Freetown (Sierra Leone) and Monrousia (Liberia), as care takes have been killed, economy disrupted and family and community lives severed.
On the streets, they shine shoes, wash and guard cars, carry luggage, hawk, beg etc. Some return home often to precarious, unhealthy and violent conditions. Many are led into the illicit and dangerous world of crime, their lives marked by aggression, abuse.
Rag picking is another pre occupation the nature of work unhygienic dangerous and demeaning. Consequences are many health problems ulcers, scabies, physical injuries; carrying heavy weight affects height, weight, strength and stamina.
Work for the Family
All of the work children do, the most common is agricultural or domestic work within their over families. This kind of work though sometimes beneficial is sometimes as exploitative. It may demand too much of children keep them from school and take too great a tell on their developing bodies, prevent them from excersing their rights and developing to their full potential.
In rural Africa and south Asia children begin well before school age. This includes an entire gamut fame work, looking after animal etc. similar work is done in Latin American countries as well. In rural Colombia, l in 4 children aged 6 to 9 and 1 in 3 aged 10 and 11 work, either in the home or helping in a small business.
Girls WorkMost of the hazards faced by boy labourers are faced by girls as well yet girls have extra problems of their own, from the sexual exploitation to exclusion from education.
According to ILO, 56% of the 10-14 yr old currently estimated to be making in the developing would are boys. Yet if one were able to measure the same of girls, the figures would be higher.
Girls also work longer hours on an average than boys. In Guatemala, working girls spend an average of 21 hours a week or household duties on top of a 40 hour working week outside.
All over the world, more girls than boys are denied their fundamental right to primary schooling.
Gender bias is enshrined in all the main institutions of society. This become a vicious circle.
The more schooling a girl has, the fever children she will have, as has been reported and again the more children a poor family has, the more child workers there will be
Ref: UNICEF Report 1997 – The State of World’s children SACCS
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
The vicious circle of child labour in India
Rachel Arora, merinews
01 March 2007, Thursday
The basic right of every human being is the Right to Happiness. But do the child labourers enjoy this basic right? No. While these children work in inhuman conditions, we live for ourselves and take delight in the agony of other people.
Child labour is one glaring issue that needs attention. It is one of the most persistent social issues that has gripped our nation since decades. We call ourselves responsible citizens but the honesty with which we need to tackle this issue seems to be missing. The government as on many other issues, makes promises but fails to deliver. The few initiatives that it tends to take are inadequate and insufficient to handle this problem.
Child labour is an issue of serious concern that requires fervent investigation. A general understanding of the problem indicating that children are being exploited and forced into labour has raised many questions concerning the government and the socio-economic status of our country. It has also raised alarming facts about the Welfare Organizations and their role in preventing the situation from getting any worse.
It is estimated that there are between 60 and 115 million working children in India as per the Human Rights Watch, 1996. UNICEF states figures ranging from75 to 90 million child labourers under the age of 14 years. This points to the fact that India has the largest number of child labourers anywhere in the world.
Child labour has been classified into nine categories under the 1981 Census of India: Cultivation, Agricultural Labour, Livestock, Forestry, Fishing, Plantation, Mining and Quarrying, Trade and Commerce, Transport, Storage and Communication and Other Services.
Another harsh fact reveals that most children in the manufacturing industry are bonded child labourers. Bonded Labour is the phenomenon of children working in conditions of slavery in order to pay off debt. There are almost one million bonded labours in India.
Shanti, 32, is a maid working in Delhi. She has 8 children and a drunkard husband to support. She lives in a slum in the Nizamuddin area and works in five households and has an earning of only Rs 1500 each month. She says that her children cannot go to school because she is unable to afford it. Moreover, she needs a few helping hands in the house. Two of her daughters aged 11 and 13 are working in local households to survive and support the family.
According to Malti, 26, it is essential for Birju, her 11-year-old son to work in order to keep the income flowing in. Birju, who works in a tea stall, barely gets a wage of Rs 250 per month.
Madhu Mehta, 47, is the wife of a rich businessman residing in Lajpat Nagar in New Delhi. She has a 10 year old ‘Chotu’ serving her and her family. He sweeps and swabs, does the dishes, the laundry, wakes up at five in the morning and goes to bed at 11:30 in the night. Madhu is defiant on being asked why she has appointed a child in her house. After much pestering she blurts out that Chotu’s parents were very poor and that they had no other option other than sending him to the city to work. They were lucky enough to have found him through a local broker who arranged for children like Chotu to work in rich households. Chotu works for a monthly wage of Rs 700.
Kailash and Mapia reside in a slum near Shahadra in Delhi. Back home, in Bengal they urgently needed money as Kailash had met with an accident. They had no other option but to sell the services of Chunni, their 9 year old daughter to the village Zamindaar.
Child labour is prevalent in one of its most heinous states in India. It is a source of income for poor families and the rights of the children go down the drain. A household in India that is subject to poverty essentially requires the services of children below the age group if 14 years. A child’s income contribution is between 34-37% of the total income generated in the household.
The lack of a sound Social Security Network combined with social evils like ignorance and poverty form the platform for child labour and its sister concern bonded child labour. This lays emphasis on the fact, as happened in the case of Kailash and Mapia that lack of bank loans, government loans and other credit sources increases the chances of more poor families succumbing to child bonded labour. The system operates in a detestable manner. When there is nowhere to go, people seek help from the local moneylender in exchange for their child’s services. Since the earnings of bonded child labourers are less than the interest applied on the loan, these children are forced to work as slaves while interest on their loans accumulates. The bonded child can only be released if his parents make a lump sum payment, which is not possible for the poor families.
According to the Indian Government Policy on Child Labour no child can be employed below the age of 14 years. The Bonded Labour Act of 1976 confirms the Indian Constitution’s directive of ending forced labour. The Act frees bonded labourers by the State. The Child Labour Act was implemented in the year 1986 and clearly stated that the minimum employment age was 15 years.
In August 1994, a development came about in the field of child welfare by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao who proposed to eliminate child labour thus relieving 2 million children from the treacherous oppression. The programme further pledged to motivate children to leave their work and enter non-formal schooling by offering an incentive of Rs100 and a meal a day on attending school.
Child labour is an agonizing reality in our nation. It is a gruesome as well as horrendous crime. But if we claim to be moral citizens we must collectively aid towards the eradication of this social evil. We are sleeping with our eyes wide open.
If someone appoints a Chotu in the neighborhood and we know it is wrong, what do we do about it? It’s high time for us to wake up. Children are vulnerable and innocent. We must raise our voice in unison for their cause. You are yourself a criminal if you support a crime.
Child labour needs to be brought to an end. The next time you speak rudely with the tiny chaiwala or criticize the work of Chotu, remember that you are committing an unforgivable crime.
Rachel Arora, merinews
01 March 2007, Thursday
The basic right of every human being is the Right to Happiness. But do the child labourers enjoy this basic right? No. While these children work in inhuman conditions, we live for ourselves and take delight in the agony of other people.
Child labour is one glaring issue that needs attention. It is one of the most persistent social issues that has gripped our nation since decades. We call ourselves responsible citizens but the honesty with which we need to tackle this issue seems to be missing. The government as on many other issues, makes promises but fails to deliver. The few initiatives that it tends to take are inadequate and insufficient to handle this problem.
Child labour is an issue of serious concern that requires fervent investigation. A general understanding of the problem indicating that children are being exploited and forced into labour has raised many questions concerning the government and the socio-economic status of our country. It has also raised alarming facts about the Welfare Organizations and their role in preventing the situation from getting any worse.
It is estimated that there are between 60 and 115 million working children in India as per the Human Rights Watch, 1996. UNICEF states figures ranging from75 to 90 million child labourers under the age of 14 years. This points to the fact that India has the largest number of child labourers anywhere in the world.
Child labour has been classified into nine categories under the 1981 Census of India: Cultivation, Agricultural Labour, Livestock, Forestry, Fishing, Plantation, Mining and Quarrying, Trade and Commerce, Transport, Storage and Communication and Other Services.
Another harsh fact reveals that most children in the manufacturing industry are bonded child labourers. Bonded Labour is the phenomenon of children working in conditions of slavery in order to pay off debt. There are almost one million bonded labours in India.
Shanti, 32, is a maid working in Delhi. She has 8 children and a drunkard husband to support. She lives in a slum in the Nizamuddin area and works in five households and has an earning of only Rs 1500 each month. She says that her children cannot go to school because she is unable to afford it. Moreover, she needs a few helping hands in the house. Two of her daughters aged 11 and 13 are working in local households to survive and support the family.
According to Malti, 26, it is essential for Birju, her 11-year-old son to work in order to keep the income flowing in. Birju, who works in a tea stall, barely gets a wage of Rs 250 per month.
Madhu Mehta, 47, is the wife of a rich businessman residing in Lajpat Nagar in New Delhi. She has a 10 year old ‘Chotu’ serving her and her family. He sweeps and swabs, does the dishes, the laundry, wakes up at five in the morning and goes to bed at 11:30 in the night. Madhu is defiant on being asked why she has appointed a child in her house. After much pestering she blurts out that Chotu’s parents were very poor and that they had no other option other than sending him to the city to work. They were lucky enough to have found him through a local broker who arranged for children like Chotu to work in rich households. Chotu works for a monthly wage of Rs 700.
Kailash and Mapia reside in a slum near Shahadra in Delhi. Back home, in Bengal they urgently needed money as Kailash had met with an accident. They had no other option but to sell the services of Chunni, their 9 year old daughter to the village Zamindaar.
Child labour is prevalent in one of its most heinous states in India. It is a source of income for poor families and the rights of the children go down the drain. A household in India that is subject to poverty essentially requires the services of children below the age group if 14 years. A child’s income contribution is between 34-37% of the total income generated in the household.
The lack of a sound Social Security Network combined with social evils like ignorance and poverty form the platform for child labour and its sister concern bonded child labour. This lays emphasis on the fact, as happened in the case of Kailash and Mapia that lack of bank loans, government loans and other credit sources increases the chances of more poor families succumbing to child bonded labour. The system operates in a detestable manner. When there is nowhere to go, people seek help from the local moneylender in exchange for their child’s services. Since the earnings of bonded child labourers are less than the interest applied on the loan, these children are forced to work as slaves while interest on their loans accumulates. The bonded child can only be released if his parents make a lump sum payment, which is not possible for the poor families.
According to the Indian Government Policy on Child Labour no child can be employed below the age of 14 years. The Bonded Labour Act of 1976 confirms the Indian Constitution’s directive of ending forced labour. The Act frees bonded labourers by the State. The Child Labour Act was implemented in the year 1986 and clearly stated that the minimum employment age was 15 years.
In August 1994, a development came about in the field of child welfare by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao who proposed to eliminate child labour thus relieving 2 million children from the treacherous oppression. The programme further pledged to motivate children to leave their work and enter non-formal schooling by offering an incentive of Rs100 and a meal a day on attending school.
Child labour is an agonizing reality in our nation. It is a gruesome as well as horrendous crime. But if we claim to be moral citizens we must collectively aid towards the eradication of this social evil. We are sleeping with our eyes wide open.
If someone appoints a Chotu in the neighborhood and we know it is wrong, what do we do about it? It’s high time for us to wake up. Children are vulnerable and innocent. We must raise our voice in unison for their cause. You are yourself a criminal if you support a crime.
Child labour needs to be brought to an end. The next time you speak rudely with the tiny chaiwala or criticize the work of Chotu, remember that you are committing an unforgivable crime.
women traffiking linked to poverty
`Women trafficking linked to poverty'
By Our Staff Reporter
NEW DELHI DEC. 11. In an attempt to highlight the dismal conditions of women being "traded as cattle'', a non-government organisation, Shakti Vahini, released a report on "Trafficking of Girls and Women into Coerced Marriage and Bonded Labour in Haryana and Punjab'', in the Capital on Wednesday.
The report aims to deal with the problem of trafficking and throws light on how the absence of a properly defined law is a handicap in protecting the rights of the victims.
Drawing a connection between the large-scale trafficking of women and girls in Haryana, Punjab and Delhi region with the widespread poverty in the "source'' region of Assam, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa, the Executive Director, Shakti Vahini, Ravi Kant, said: "Poverty, lower position of women and lack of opportunities remain the main reasons behind the victimisation in the source States, the disparity in the sex ratio in the demand States is equally important in fuelling the process of bridal importation.''
The result of year-long study by Shakti Vahini to assess the exact magnitude of the situation on the ground, the report tries to analyse the socio-cultural context of the problem. It also has case studies on the victims of this inhuman crime.
"The number of victims is difficult to judge from the fact that there is hardly a village in these States where one will not come across a few brides.
But the general estimates point to around 5,000 to 10,000 in Mewat and surrounding areas, 4,000 to 5,000 in Mansa and the surrounding districts and several times over in Doaba and other regions of Punjab.
Despite the rise in the number of cases in these areas, Haryana and Punjab were not even on the `Trafficking Map' until recently,'' lamented Mr. Kant.
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By Our Staff Reporter
NEW DELHI DEC. 11. In an attempt to highlight the dismal conditions of women being "traded as cattle'', a non-government organisation, Shakti Vahini, released a report on "Trafficking of Girls and Women into Coerced Marriage and Bonded Labour in Haryana and Punjab'', in the Capital on Wednesday.
The report aims to deal with the problem of trafficking and throws light on how the absence of a properly defined law is a handicap in protecting the rights of the victims.
Drawing a connection between the large-scale trafficking of women and girls in Haryana, Punjab and Delhi region with the widespread poverty in the "source'' region of Assam, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa, the Executive Director, Shakti Vahini, Ravi Kant, said: "Poverty, lower position of women and lack of opportunities remain the main reasons behind the victimisation in the source States, the disparity in the sex ratio in the demand States is equally important in fuelling the process of bridal importation.''
The result of year-long study by Shakti Vahini to assess the exact magnitude of the situation on the ground, the report tries to analyse the socio-cultural context of the problem. It also has case studies on the victims of this inhuman crime.
"The number of victims is difficult to judge from the fact that there is hardly a village in these States where one will not come across a few brides.
But the general estimates point to around 5,000 to 10,000 in Mewat and surrounding areas, 4,000 to 5,000 in Mansa and the surrounding districts and several times over in Doaba and other regions of Punjab.
Despite the rise in the number of cases in these areas, Haryana and Punjab were not even on the `Trafficking Map' until recently,'' lamented Mr. Kant.
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MISSING DAUGHTERS
India's missing girlsDaughters aren't wanted in India. So many female foetuses are illegally aborted that baby boys now hugely outnumber baby girls, while a government minister has begged parents to abandon their children rather than kill them. What does this mean for the country's future, ask Raekha Prasad and Randeep Ramesh Wednesday February 28, 2007The Guardian A young girl looks on during a rally against female foeticide in New Delhi. Photograph: Gurinder Osan/AP
Bhavia is sleeping swaddled in a woolly peach cardigan amid the wailing and flailing limbs of 20 other babies. Nurses in lilac saris and face masks scoop the bundles from rockers and jig them under the wintry Delhi sun. Two days ago, the baby girl became the newest arrival at Palna, an orphanage in the capital's Civil Lines district. But Bhavia is not an orphan. She is what used to be known as "a foundling", abandoned by her mother in a local hospital.
Article continues
When Bhavia came to Palna she was nameless, with no date of birth. What is certain, from a cursory glance at the line of babies, is that an orphanage is one of the few places in India where males are outnumbered. For every boy lying in the sunny courtyard, there are four girls. Some have been dumped outside police stations, some in railway toilets, crowded fairgrounds, or the dark corners of bus stations. Others were left outside the orphanage in a wicker cradle, in a specially built alcove by a busy road. The weight of a child here will set off an alarm, alerting Palna's staff to a new arrival.
Almost always, it is girls who are left in the cradle. Healthy boys are only deserted in India if born to single mothers; boys left by a married couple are the disabled ones. Not all abandoned girls come from families too poor to feed them, however. Some have been found with a neatly packed bag containing a change of clothes, milk formula and disposable nappies.
Girls such as Bhavia are survivors in an India where it has never been more dangerous to be conceived female. A preference for boys, who carry on the family bloodline and inherit wealth, has always existed in Indian society. But what has made being a girl so risky now, is the lethal cocktail of new money mixed with medical technology that makes it possible to tell the sex of a baby while it is still in the womb.
Although gender-based abortion is illegal, parents are choosing to abort female foetuses in such large numbers that experts estimate India has lost 10 million girls in the past two decades. In the 12 years since selective abortion was outlawed, only one doctor has been convicted of carrying out the crime.
This hidden tragedy surfaces not only in the statistics of skewed sex ratios, but also in the back yards of clinics that hoped to bury the evidence. Earlier this month police arrested two people after the discovery of 400 pieces of bones believed to be of female foetuses in the town of Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh. Last September, the remains of dozens of babies were exhumed from a pit outside an abortion clinic in Punjab. According to investigators, that clinic was run by an untrained, unqualified retired soldier and his wife. To dispose of the evidence, acid was use to melt the flesh and then the bones were hammered to smithereens.
Last year, in a series of reports entitled Kokh Me Katl, or Murder in the Womb, two journalists working for India's Sahara Samay television channel found 100 doctors, in both private and government hospitals, who were prepared to perform illegal terminations of girl foetuses. In the grainy TV pictures, doctors from four states and 36 cities talked with chilling casualness about how to dump the remains. Many weren't bothered about the foetus's age, just that it was a girl that could be got rid off. The average cost of the procedure was a few thousand rupees (around £30).
In Agra, one doctor told the reporters to get rid of the dead foetus in the Yamuna river, which curves past the Taj Mahal. "That is not a problem. Take a rickshaw and throw it in the river," he said. In Dholpur, a town in Rajasthan, a female medic said the fields were pitted with the unmarked graves of unborn girls. She told the undercover couple that if their foetus was too big to easily be disposed of, they should pay a street sweeper to get rid of the body.
The latest estimate of India's sex ratio at birth (SRB) can be gleamed from a sample registration system that covers 1.3m households. For the two years up to 2004, India had just 882 girls per 1,000 boys. Only China is worse. Beijing's harsh, yet effective, family-planning policy limited urban couples to a single child -which was usually a boy. China's sex ratio stands at just 832:1,000. Sabu George, a Delhi-based researcher who has worked for two decades on female foeticide, describes the first few months in the womb as "the riskiest part of a woman's life cycle in India". The sex ratios in the country, he says, are getting worse "day by day". India, he says, now has 930,000 missing girls every year. "What we are talking about is a massive, hidden number of deaths."
Although ministers in India have woken up to "a national crisis", the response has been to condone the abandonment of female babies. "lf you don't want a girl, leave her to us," Renuka Chowdhury, India's minister of state for women and child development, said recently. The government "will bring up your children. Don't kill them". The announcement was a desperate response to stem India's dramatic deficit of women. In the west, women outnumber men by at least 3%. India has almost 8% more men than women. The question for India is what sort of future it faces without enough women. One dystopian answer, given by academics Valerie M Hudson and Andrea den Boer, is that a generation of men unable to find wives has already emerged. In their book, Bare Branches, they write of men who will never marry and have children. It is these men, they say, who are already largely responsible for social unrest in those areas where women are in short supply.
Indian scholars, they say, have noted a growing relationship between sex ratios and violent crime in Indian states. When potential wives are scarce, it is the least-skilled and educated men who are left on the shelf. Hudson and Den Boer put forward a scenario where large areas of India could be overrun by this under-class, with marauding groups of under-educated testosterone-high youths wreaking havoc. "It will mean a stronger masculine and macho culture," says Den Boer, co-author and lecturer in International Politics at the University of Kent. "Men do change their behaviour when they settle down. Those growing pools of men that don't are more likely to congregate to take part in stealing, gangs, bootlegging and terrorism."
In villages across the flat plains of north India, two decades of widespread female foeticide is already felt by thousands of families who cannot find brides for their sons. One local leader in the state of Haryana likened the lack of marriageable women to the shortage of grain in a famine.
It is an apt simile, given that the response to the catastrophe has seen women from poorer states being traded like a commodity by bride traffickers. As little as 10,000 rupees (£125) is paid to impoverished families in Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh for a daughter who will supposedly be found a job in a more prosperous part of India. The reality is that she will be sold into a forced marriage to a family in a richer state.
So significant has the lack of brides become in Punjab and Haryana that the issue has seeped into its politics, engulfing local elections. Candidates standing for office pledge that they will "help provide girls" if elected. Village leaders are accosted by unmarried men and asked to find them brides. Meanwhile, activists say that trafficked girls - who are often underage - are treated as bonded labour and sex slaves once married. The groups supporting trafficked brides are overwhelmed by the extent of the problem. "We're losing the battle," says Ravi Kant, executive director of Shakti Vahini, an organisation working on the ramifications of female foeticide. "It is in every village. The police are saying these families are doing nothing wrong. There's collusion between the law and the politicians, and it's destroying the whole social fabric."
India's paradox is that prosperity has not meant progress. Development has not erased traditional values: in fact, selective abortion has been accelerated in a globalising India. On the one hand there has been new money and an awareness of family planning - so family sizes get smaller. But wealthier - and better- educated - Indians still want sons. A recent survey revealed that female foeticide was highest among women with university degrees.
The demographic consequences of mass female foeticide are most pronounced in the most developed parts of India. In Delhi, one of the richest cities in India, there are just 827 girls per 1,000 boys being born. Not far away, in the wealthy farming belt of Kurukshetra, there are only 770.
At the heart of the matter lies the most sacred institution in Indian life: marriage. New money has raised the price of wedlock, a ritual still governed by the past. Not only do most Indians believe in arranged marriage, in which dowry payments are made; there is also a widespread acceptance of the inequality between bride-givers and bride-takers.
The bride's side, according to convention, is supposed to give but never take from the groom's family. In today's India that translates into an evermore expensive gift list of consumer goods. Decades ago, a wealthy bride's father would have been expected to give gold bracelets. Today it is jewellery, fridges, cars and foreign holidays - and the bride's family may end up paying the bill for the rest of their lives.
A son, by contrast, is an asset to his family. Even leaving aside the wealth his bride will bring, a boy will retain the family - and the caste - name. He will also inherit the property, and is seen as a way of securing parent-care in old age.
Indians, therefore, have come to view the girl child as a burden, an investment without return. A favourite Hindi saying translates as: "Having a girl is to plant a seed in someone else's garden." One of the results is that women themselves face immense family pressure to get rid of the girl in their womb. Feminists in India argue that criminalising women who have done so is to ignore how fiercely patriarchal the value system is. As some see it, a woman who participates in the killing of her own child is actually denying her own self-value and should not be punished but be treated with concern.
Some of India's traditional attitudes are changing, with women fighting to choose partners and different lifestyles. In some urban parts of the country, live-in relationships are tolerated. Parents accept boyfriends in a manner unthinkable even a decade ago. "There's no obvious sexual revolution, but things clearly are changing," says Mary E John, director for India's Centre for Women's Development Studies. But technology is spreading faster than such western values. Clinics spring up daily offering amniocentesis and ultrasound, scientific advances that are capable of predicting the sex of a foetus.
The trickle down of cash means that even lower middle-class families can afford a few thousands rupees on the technology. Before sex-selective abortion was outlawed in 1994, clinics would advertise terminating girls as "spend 3,000 now and save 300,000 later".
Multinational companies began to sense a huge market opportunity in the mid-90s in India. Every three years the market doubles, and sales of scanners are thought to be running at 10,000 a year.
First American, then Korean and now Chinese companies have pitched up to make and sell scanners. Some campaigners claim that the American giant General Electric's early arrival in the market indirectly led to millions of aborted girls.
Although there is a law forbidding sales of scanners to unregistered clinics and quack doctors, the campaigner Sabu George talks of a widespread "indifference of ethics". He says 16m illegal ultrasound scans have been conducted since India's law was introduced. "How many more millions of girls will have to disappear from India before companies such as GE will recognise their responsibility?" he adds.
General Electric counters that such accusations are like blaming car manufacturers for road accidents. "We support efforts to strengthen protection against sex determination and misuse of diagnostic equipment," the company says in a statement.
The diffusion of medical technology and India's traditions are not the only reason for the country's endangered daughters. India's medical profession, which works in one of the most privatised systems in the world, is certainly culpable. Some doctors, it seems, will do anything for a fee.
Many of those caught on camera in the Murder in the Womb operation were open about using high-quality ultrasound machines to determine the sex of the foetus. Under Indian law, however, doctors who use "sonography" are forbidden to tell mothers the sex of the child. The penalty is prison and a fine of up to 100,000 rupees (£1,200). They were also undeterred by performing late abortions - in some cases happily willing to terminate pregnancies months after India's 20-week limit.
Despite being caught red-handed and on tape, a year later just seven doctors have been suspended. Two dozen are under police investigation, but no charges have, so far, been brought. Many of the clinics continue to operate despite campaigners staging sit-ins in waiting rooms. The journalists have received death threats.
"Doctors are millionaires in India. They are politically and socially well-connected. Powerful people can slow and stop investigations," says Shripal Shaktawat, one of the reporters who conducted the exposé.
India's labyrinthine laws and its antiquated judicial system have also created mixed messages regarding abortion rights. The banning of selective abortion has led to many women thinking they no longer have a right to a legal abortion. Some feminists are concerned that the campaigns against female foeticide have inadvertently driven women to seek backstreet abortions.
No one has any quick-fix answers to deeply held and pervasive prejudices against women. The question for India is whether girls like Bhavia, that abandoned and unwanted bundle lying in a Delhi orphanage, will have choices that her own mother never did.
Bhavia is sleeping swaddled in a woolly peach cardigan amid the wailing and flailing limbs of 20 other babies. Nurses in lilac saris and face masks scoop the bundles from rockers and jig them under the wintry Delhi sun. Two days ago, the baby girl became the newest arrival at Palna, an orphanage in the capital's Civil Lines district. But Bhavia is not an orphan. She is what used to be known as "a foundling", abandoned by her mother in a local hospital.
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When Bhavia came to Palna she was nameless, with no date of birth. What is certain, from a cursory glance at the line of babies, is that an orphanage is one of the few places in India where males are outnumbered. For every boy lying in the sunny courtyard, there are four girls. Some have been dumped outside police stations, some in railway toilets, crowded fairgrounds, or the dark corners of bus stations. Others were left outside the orphanage in a wicker cradle, in a specially built alcove by a busy road. The weight of a child here will set off an alarm, alerting Palna's staff to a new arrival.
Almost always, it is girls who are left in the cradle. Healthy boys are only deserted in India if born to single mothers; boys left by a married couple are the disabled ones. Not all abandoned girls come from families too poor to feed them, however. Some have been found with a neatly packed bag containing a change of clothes, milk formula and disposable nappies.
Girls such as Bhavia are survivors in an India where it has never been more dangerous to be conceived female. A preference for boys, who carry on the family bloodline and inherit wealth, has always existed in Indian society. But what has made being a girl so risky now, is the lethal cocktail of new money mixed with medical technology that makes it possible to tell the sex of a baby while it is still in the womb.
Although gender-based abortion is illegal, parents are choosing to abort female foetuses in such large numbers that experts estimate India has lost 10 million girls in the past two decades. In the 12 years since selective abortion was outlawed, only one doctor has been convicted of carrying out the crime.
This hidden tragedy surfaces not only in the statistics of skewed sex ratios, but also in the back yards of clinics that hoped to bury the evidence. Earlier this month police arrested two people after the discovery of 400 pieces of bones believed to be of female foetuses in the town of Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh. Last September, the remains of dozens of babies were exhumed from a pit outside an abortion clinic in Punjab. According to investigators, that clinic was run by an untrained, unqualified retired soldier and his wife. To dispose of the evidence, acid was use to melt the flesh and then the bones were hammered to smithereens.
Last year, in a series of reports entitled Kokh Me Katl, or Murder in the Womb, two journalists working for India's Sahara Samay television channel found 100 doctors, in both private and government hospitals, who were prepared to perform illegal terminations of girl foetuses. In the grainy TV pictures, doctors from four states and 36 cities talked with chilling casualness about how to dump the remains. Many weren't bothered about the foetus's age, just that it was a girl that could be got rid off. The average cost of the procedure was a few thousand rupees (around £30).
In Agra, one doctor told the reporters to get rid of the dead foetus in the Yamuna river, which curves past the Taj Mahal. "That is not a problem. Take a rickshaw and throw it in the river," he said. In Dholpur, a town in Rajasthan, a female medic said the fields were pitted with the unmarked graves of unborn girls. She told the undercover couple that if their foetus was too big to easily be disposed of, they should pay a street sweeper to get rid of the body.
The latest estimate of India's sex ratio at birth (SRB) can be gleamed from a sample registration system that covers 1.3m households. For the two years up to 2004, India had just 882 girls per 1,000 boys. Only China is worse. Beijing's harsh, yet effective, family-planning policy limited urban couples to a single child -which was usually a boy. China's sex ratio stands at just 832:1,000. Sabu George, a Delhi-based researcher who has worked for two decades on female foeticide, describes the first few months in the womb as "the riskiest part of a woman's life cycle in India". The sex ratios in the country, he says, are getting worse "day by day". India, he says, now has 930,000 missing girls every year. "What we are talking about is a massive, hidden number of deaths."
Although ministers in India have woken up to "a national crisis", the response has been to condone the abandonment of female babies. "lf you don't want a girl, leave her to us," Renuka Chowdhury, India's minister of state for women and child development, said recently. The government "will bring up your children. Don't kill them". The announcement was a desperate response to stem India's dramatic deficit of women. In the west, women outnumber men by at least 3%. India has almost 8% more men than women. The question for India is what sort of future it faces without enough women. One dystopian answer, given by academics Valerie M Hudson and Andrea den Boer, is that a generation of men unable to find wives has already emerged. In their book, Bare Branches, they write of men who will never marry and have children. It is these men, they say, who are already largely responsible for social unrest in those areas where women are in short supply.
Indian scholars, they say, have noted a growing relationship between sex ratios and violent crime in Indian states. When potential wives are scarce, it is the least-skilled and educated men who are left on the shelf. Hudson and Den Boer put forward a scenario where large areas of India could be overrun by this under-class, with marauding groups of under-educated testosterone-high youths wreaking havoc. "It will mean a stronger masculine and macho culture," says Den Boer, co-author and lecturer in International Politics at the University of Kent. "Men do change their behaviour when they settle down. Those growing pools of men that don't are more likely to congregate to take part in stealing, gangs, bootlegging and terrorism."
In villages across the flat plains of north India, two decades of widespread female foeticide is already felt by thousands of families who cannot find brides for their sons. One local leader in the state of Haryana likened the lack of marriageable women to the shortage of grain in a famine.
It is an apt simile, given that the response to the catastrophe has seen women from poorer states being traded like a commodity by bride traffickers. As little as 10,000 rupees (£125) is paid to impoverished families in Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh for a daughter who will supposedly be found a job in a more prosperous part of India. The reality is that she will be sold into a forced marriage to a family in a richer state.
So significant has the lack of brides become in Punjab and Haryana that the issue has seeped into its politics, engulfing local elections. Candidates standing for office pledge that they will "help provide girls" if elected. Village leaders are accosted by unmarried men and asked to find them brides. Meanwhile, activists say that trafficked girls - who are often underage - are treated as bonded labour and sex slaves once married. The groups supporting trafficked brides are overwhelmed by the extent of the problem. "We're losing the battle," says Ravi Kant, executive director of Shakti Vahini, an organisation working on the ramifications of female foeticide. "It is in every village. The police are saying these families are doing nothing wrong. There's collusion between the law and the politicians, and it's destroying the whole social fabric."
India's paradox is that prosperity has not meant progress. Development has not erased traditional values: in fact, selective abortion has been accelerated in a globalising India. On the one hand there has been new money and an awareness of family planning - so family sizes get smaller. But wealthier - and better- educated - Indians still want sons. A recent survey revealed that female foeticide was highest among women with university degrees.
The demographic consequences of mass female foeticide are most pronounced in the most developed parts of India. In Delhi, one of the richest cities in India, there are just 827 girls per 1,000 boys being born. Not far away, in the wealthy farming belt of Kurukshetra, there are only 770.
At the heart of the matter lies the most sacred institution in Indian life: marriage. New money has raised the price of wedlock, a ritual still governed by the past. Not only do most Indians believe in arranged marriage, in which dowry payments are made; there is also a widespread acceptance of the inequality between bride-givers and bride-takers.
The bride's side, according to convention, is supposed to give but never take from the groom's family. In today's India that translates into an evermore expensive gift list of consumer goods. Decades ago, a wealthy bride's father would have been expected to give gold bracelets. Today it is jewellery, fridges, cars and foreign holidays - and the bride's family may end up paying the bill for the rest of their lives.
A son, by contrast, is an asset to his family. Even leaving aside the wealth his bride will bring, a boy will retain the family - and the caste - name. He will also inherit the property, and is seen as a way of securing parent-care in old age.
Indians, therefore, have come to view the girl child as a burden, an investment without return. A favourite Hindi saying translates as: "Having a girl is to plant a seed in someone else's garden." One of the results is that women themselves face immense family pressure to get rid of the girl in their womb. Feminists in India argue that criminalising women who have done so is to ignore how fiercely patriarchal the value system is. As some see it, a woman who participates in the killing of her own child is actually denying her own self-value and should not be punished but be treated with concern.
Some of India's traditional attitudes are changing, with women fighting to choose partners and different lifestyles. In some urban parts of the country, live-in relationships are tolerated. Parents accept boyfriends in a manner unthinkable even a decade ago. "There's no obvious sexual revolution, but things clearly are changing," says Mary E John, director for India's Centre for Women's Development Studies. But technology is spreading faster than such western values. Clinics spring up daily offering amniocentesis and ultrasound, scientific advances that are capable of predicting the sex of a foetus.
The trickle down of cash means that even lower middle-class families can afford a few thousands rupees on the technology. Before sex-selective abortion was outlawed in 1994, clinics would advertise terminating girls as "spend 3,000 now and save 300,000 later".
Multinational companies began to sense a huge market opportunity in the mid-90s in India. Every three years the market doubles, and sales of scanners are thought to be running at 10,000 a year.
First American, then Korean and now Chinese companies have pitched up to make and sell scanners. Some campaigners claim that the American giant General Electric's early arrival in the market indirectly led to millions of aborted girls.
Although there is a law forbidding sales of scanners to unregistered clinics and quack doctors, the campaigner Sabu George talks of a widespread "indifference of ethics". He says 16m illegal ultrasound scans have been conducted since India's law was introduced. "How many more millions of girls will have to disappear from India before companies such as GE will recognise their responsibility?" he adds.
General Electric counters that such accusations are like blaming car manufacturers for road accidents. "We support efforts to strengthen protection against sex determination and misuse of diagnostic equipment," the company says in a statement.
The diffusion of medical technology and India's traditions are not the only reason for the country's endangered daughters. India's medical profession, which works in one of the most privatised systems in the world, is certainly culpable. Some doctors, it seems, will do anything for a fee.
Many of those caught on camera in the Murder in the Womb operation were open about using high-quality ultrasound machines to determine the sex of the foetus. Under Indian law, however, doctors who use "sonography" are forbidden to tell mothers the sex of the child. The penalty is prison and a fine of up to 100,000 rupees (£1,200). They were also undeterred by performing late abortions - in some cases happily willing to terminate pregnancies months after India's 20-week limit.
Despite being caught red-handed and on tape, a year later just seven doctors have been suspended. Two dozen are under police investigation, but no charges have, so far, been brought. Many of the clinics continue to operate despite campaigners staging sit-ins in waiting rooms. The journalists have received death threats.
"Doctors are millionaires in India. They are politically and socially well-connected. Powerful people can slow and stop investigations," says Shripal Shaktawat, one of the reporters who conducted the exposé.
India's labyrinthine laws and its antiquated judicial system have also created mixed messages regarding abortion rights. The banning of selective abortion has led to many women thinking they no longer have a right to a legal abortion. Some feminists are concerned that the campaigns against female foeticide have inadvertently driven women to seek backstreet abortions.
No one has any quick-fix answers to deeply held and pervasive prejudices against women. The question for India is whether girls like Bhavia, that abandoned and unwanted bundle lying in a Delhi orphanage, will have choices that her own mother never did.
MINISTER:JUVENILE COURTS TO BE SET IN ALL DISTRICTS
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Minister: Juvenile courts to be set up in all districts
Minister: Juvenile courts to be set up in all districtsHT CorrespondentJabalpur, February 25, 2007WOMAN AND Child Development and Social Justice Minister Kusum Mahdele said on Saturday that the government would soon open juvenile courts in each district for speedy disposal of cases related to children. She said the number of juvenile courts in the State is insufficient at present and more courts are needed for disposal of cases.The minister said that Bal Bhawan, akin to Bhopal, would be opened in Jabalpur in April. She said it is planned to open Bal Bhawan at the divisional headquarters, where children would receive training in sports, music, arts and would also be taught science and other subjects.Mahdele told the media persons that the beneficiaries under the social security and old age pension schemes would get the amount by the fifth of every month. He said her department had issued instructions in this regard to the authorities.She disclosed that the government was contemplating a plan to reserve 50 per cent seats of supervisor cadre in Anganwadi for women.To a query about promoting Anganwadi workers on the post of supervisor, she said the government would fill up 50 per cent posts of supervisor through Anganwadi workers for which they will have to qualify the test conducted by the Professional Examination Board.Mahdele announced that 75 per cent amount for construction of hostel for working women and the students in the campus of Government Mankunwar Bai College here would be provided by the government.
Minister: Juvenile courts to be set up in all districts
Minister: Juvenile courts to be set up in all districtsHT CorrespondentJabalpur, February 25, 2007WOMAN AND Child Development and Social Justice Minister Kusum Mahdele said on Saturday that the government would soon open juvenile courts in each district for speedy disposal of cases related to children. She said the number of juvenile courts in the State is insufficient at present and more courts are needed for disposal of cases.The minister said that Bal Bhawan, akin to Bhopal, would be opened in Jabalpur in April. She said it is planned to open Bal Bhawan at the divisional headquarters, where children would receive training in sports, music, arts and would also be taught science and other subjects.Mahdele told the media persons that the beneficiaries under the social security and old age pension schemes would get the amount by the fifth of every month. He said her department had issued instructions in this regard to the authorities.She disclosed that the government was contemplating a plan to reserve 50 per cent seats of supervisor cadre in Anganwadi for women.To a query about promoting Anganwadi workers on the post of supervisor, she said the government would fill up 50 per cent posts of supervisor through Anganwadi workers for which they will have to qualify the test conducted by the Professional Examination Board.Mahdele announced that 75 per cent amount for construction of hostel for working women and the students in the campus of Government Mankunwar Bai College here would be provided by the government.
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