Children slaves to India's silk industry: human rights group

DELHI - Hundreds of thousands of children - some as young as five - toil as "slaves" in India's silk industry, enduring beatings, burns and 12-hour days, according to Human Rights Watch.

They are bonded labour, powerless juveniles doomed to remain bound to their employers because they are recruited to work in exchange for a loan to their families which they can never earn enough to repay. The human rights group interviewed children, employers and officials in three states - Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka - that form the core of India's silk industry, and produced a shocking picture of a world of cruelty and exploitation.

The 85-page report concluded that "at every stage of the silk industry, bonded children as young as five work 12 or more hours a day, six and a half or seven days a week under conditions of physical and verbal abuse."

They work at every stage of the industry, it says - from hauling baskets to embroidery - suffering injuries from the machines and sharp threads.

"The Indian government knows about these children and has the mandate to free them. Instead, for reasons of apathy, caste bias, and corruption, many government officials deny that they exist at all," it said.

It said that children making silk thread routinely dip their hands in boiling water that burns and blisters them." Their hands become raw and often infected. "They breathe smoke and fumes from machinery, handle dead worms that cause infections, and guide twisting threads that cut their fingers."

Most of the children are Dalits, the bottom rungs of Indian society formerly known as Untouchables. They can be found working openly in south India in factories with up to 50 looms, it says. The report says children sit at cramped looms in damp, dim rooms.

"They do not go to school and are often beaten by their employers," the report says. "By the time they reach adulthood, they are impoverished, illiterate, and often crippled by the work.

"Contagious diseases, especially tuberculosis and digestive disorders, spread easily in the crowded rooms. Poor lighting and constant visual strain damages the eyesight. The fine silk threads cut the fingers, and the cuts are difficult to heal properly. Children frequently complained that employers beat them and abused them verbally."

Child labour in India, where there are an estimated 60-115m working children, has long been an issue with human rights activists. After an international outcry over child labour in 1996, India's Supreme Court issued laws for punishing employers of children in hazardous labour and for rehabilitating them. The next year the court ordered India's National Human Rights Commission to supervise implementation of the bonded labour law by India's states. There were some high-profile raids on employers. Only a tiny handful produced convictions. But HRW's new findings in the textile industry reveal that the problem is still enormous.

It says that, by the most conservative estimate possible, there must be at least 350,000 bonded children in India's silk industry. It called on the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee to implement existing laws to free "bonded children".

"The Indian government says there are no bonded children, but they're everywhere. They are easy to find," said Zama Coursen-Neff, author of the report, and counsel to Human Rights Watch children's rights division.

She said that in some states, like Uttar Pradesh, child workers had been moved into homes where they will be more difficult to locate. Her investiagtion found that "upper-caste communities inflict violence and economic boycotts on Dalits who challenge their expected social roles, keeping Dalit families in bondage and a perpetual state of poverty."

- INDEPENDENT