NEWS ON SHAKTI VAHINI

Minor help rescued from Gurgaon

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, FIGHT SLAVERY, SHAKTI VAHINI by NNLRJ INDIA on August 12, 2012

Minor help rescued from Gurgaon

Minor help rescued from Gurgaon

HINDUSTAN TIMES

A 10-year-old domestic help, from Moradabad in UP, was rescued from a house in Belvedere Park building in DLF Phase 2 on Saturday evening. Acting on a tip-off, a team comprising officials of the district child protection department, police and NGO Shakti Vahini raided the house.and rescued the girl.“We have conducted the girl’s medical examination and are awaiting the report. She has been sent to a shelter home. We are investigating the matter and will file an FIR against the accused,” said a police official.

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Most rescued childeren are never rehabilitated

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, CHILD RIGHTS, JUSTICE FOR RUCHIKA, JUVENILE JUSTICE, SHAKTI VAHINI, SURVIVORS by NNLRJ INDIA on June 12, 2012

Most rescued childeren are never rehabilitated

Most rescued childeren are never rehabilitated

 PRERNA SODHI IN THE TIMES OF INDIA

NEW DELHI: The teenage help who was rescued from a Dwarka apartment in March is now enrolled in a school in Jharkhand. She has received her wage arrears, besides support from the state. But hers is an exceptional story of rehabilitation. Experts say most trafficked children, even when rescued, lead bleak lives.

Take the case of two girls — aged 12 and 13 — who were brought to Delhi a year ago and sexually assaulted at a placement agency. After their rescue, they were sent to a shelter home in West Bengal, and have not received any significant help.

Experts say care and aid are lavished on victims only after their cases grab media attention. Generally, though, rescued children get trapped in procedural hurdles. The luckier ones are ‘reunited’ with their families but not rehabilitated and, occasionally, children even slip back into the hands of traffickers.

Rishikant, an activist from NGO Shakti Vahini, said, “We get many complaints and some of the offences are grave. The state machinery moves when a case gets highlighted. In most cases, the child welfare committees (CWCs) merely dump the children back home without follow-up,” he said. The chairperson of the Lajpat Nagar CWC said, “Reuniting does not mean rehabilitation.” Shakti Vahini claims that of the 200 children it rescued last year, none has been properly rehabilitated.

In most cases, delays occur due to poor inter-state coordination. “The authorities here are not so concerned as 90% of the cases are from other states. Their attitude is that the other state has to take care of them,” said CWC chairperson Raaj Mangal Prasad. It is also observed that the CWCs of the other states are not so zealous in their work.

Rishi Kant, another Shakti Vahini member, said this hampers follow-up action. “The CWC might pass orders in the city and, to an extent, also recover children’s due wages, but it becomes difficult to follow up on a case on a day-to-day basis.” He suggests that the labour department should act as an intermediary between source states and cities from where children are rescued.

The director for policy and research at Child Rights and You (CRY), Vijaylakshmi Arora, said lack of manpower is another important hurdle in rehabilitation. “If you go to the district level or the CWCs, you don’t find much manpower. It is usually one man taking care of 50 cases. That ratio has to be improved.”

Arora said a system needs to be in place to track each and every child’s case separately “as each child’s case is different and the factors for trafficking are different. This will also keep tabs on children who have been re-trafficked; at present there is no system to monitor that.”

While lack of manpower and poor interstate coordination hinder the process of rehabilitation, Prasad said transferring the monitoring of child labour to the department of women and child development will help. “The Child Labour Act that falls under the labour department does not look into the rehabilitation of a child; this is done by the Juvenile Justice Act that is the responsibility of the department of women and child development,” he said, adding, “Shifting the child labour issue to them would speed up the process”.

PRERNA SODHI IN THE TIMES OF INDIA

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3 Jharkhand, Bengal girls rescued

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, CHILD RIGHTS, FIGHT SLAVERY, SHAKTI VAHINI, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN by NNLRJ INDIA on May 8, 2012
3 Jharkhand, Bengal girls rescued

3 Jharkhand, Bengal girls rescued

DWIPAYAN GHOSH IN THE TIMES OF INDIA – MAY 5 , 2012

NEW DELHI: Delhi Police, under fire from the Child Welfare Committee for failing to trace trafficked girls, has rescued three girls from different parts of the capital. The girls from Jharkhand and West Bengal were brought to the city after being drugged and locked up inside toilets of express trains. Once in the capital, they were either employed as domestic help or sold off to brothels.

On May 2, a 15-year-old girl from Simdega in Jharkhand was rescued from the house of one Virender Singh in Pitampura by a joint team of Maurya Enclave Police and Shakti Vahini, an NGO. The girl was allegedly brought to Delhi by one Taleshwar from her village and was employed in Singh’s house as a domestic help allegedly by one Ajit Pyari of a placement agency. But she had not been able to contact Pyari for the past two months.

Two other trafficking victims have been rescued from the GB Road area by a joint team of West Bengal Police and Delhi Police. One Jahangir has also been arrested from Manikchar village in Bengal’s Joynagar and sent to judicial custody. One of the girls, from South 24 Parganas of West Bengal, was lured by one Bappa Haldar with the promise of a better job. She was earning Rs 1,000 a month as a help. The trafficker took her to Howrah station but they boarded a train to Delhi. “I asked him where we were going. He said the owner of the hotel where I was supposed to work lived nearby. When I got suspicious, he threatened me, saying he would push me off the train,” the girl said.

After reaching Delhi, she was kept in a house at Kotla Mubarakpur in south Delhi. There she met another girl from Bengal. After three days, both girls were taken to GB Road. Following a tip-off, a team of Delhi Police and Shakti Vahini, raided the brothel and rescued them on March 31.

3 Jharkhand, Bengal girls rescued

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India’s missing daughters

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, CHILD RIGHTS, FIGHT SLAVERY, JUVENILE JUSTICE, SHAKTI VAHINI, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN by NNLRJ INDIA on April 22, 2012

NDTV 24X7 visits the Village in Jharkhand from where the 13 year old trafficked victim was rescued by Shakti Vahini on 29 March 2012 .  In village after village in Jharkhand, we find the story of missing daughters. The girls belonged to the weakest, most vulnerable families, and they were lured by traffickers who lived amongst them.

They find out a no rule of law – no access to justice and no child protection systems

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Placement agencies or exploitation hubs?

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, CHILD RIGHTS, FIGHT SLAVERY, JUVENILE JUSTICE, SHAKTI VAHINI by NNLRJ INDIA on April 22, 2012

NDTV 24X7

Placement agencies have mushroomed over the past five years in Delhi, providing domestic helps to NCR families. But almost ninety per cent of these agencies are unregulated, and become the not registered, and become the first point of exploitation for girls brought from other parts of the country to the capital.

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Girl alleges rape forced miscarriage by placement agency owner

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, CHILD RIGHTS, FIGHT SLAVERY, SHAKTI VAHINI by NNLRJ INDIA on April 18, 2012

SHALINI NARAYAN IN THE INDIAN EXPRESS

She winces at the thought of the trauma she went through over the past five months in a city that was alien to her. She was allegedly raped and threatened by her placement agency owner who brought her to the city for employment as a domestic help.

On Friday night, it was only after she started bleeding profusely and was rushed to a nearby clinic by the agency owner that the 18-year-old realised she was pregnant and was going through a miscarriage.

The girl told police that the agency owner had made her take some pills after she informed him about her pregnancy, which led to the miscarriage. The man, identified as Rajesh, took her to the hospital and disappeared thereafter, police said.

 Police are now on the lookout for him and two of his associates, one of whom runs a separate placement agency in Chirag Dilli, Southeast Delhi.

 According to police, the girl, who hails from Gumla district in Jharkhand, was brought to the city five months ago by a woman named Kunti Devi, also from Gumla.

The victim told Newsline: “Kunti Devi came to my house last year and told me that she would take me to Delhi and find me a job. She brought me to Delhi. Kunti was quite well known in the village as she has brought several girls to the city,” she said.

Here, she was taken to ‘Rita Placement Agency’ in Aligaon. The agency, she told police, was being run by a man named Rajesh. “Kunti is Rajesh’s wife and as soon as we reached the agency, she left for our village,” the girl, who has studied till Class IV, said.

“I was made to stay in a room with 14 other girls. We were sent to various houses to work as domestic help and do daily chores,” she said. However, the girl said she was never paid. “We were told we would be given our salaries, but till now, I haven’t received anything,” she said.

 Two months into her stay in Delhi, Rajesh called her to his room. “He stays at the agency itself. He raped me and told me never to disclose the incident to anyone,” she said.

“I kept quiet as I was afraid he would hit me. Later, I learnt that he had raped another girl who he brought from Gumla. When she tried escaping, he thrashed her badly,” the girl said.

The girl said she worked simultaneously for another placement agency in Chirag Dilli, run by a man named Pancham. “We would alternate between the two agencies whenever there was shortage of helps,” she said.

 The girl, who has worked in two houses in Gurgaon and Faridabad as a help, said she was ill-treated by her employers as well.

 Rishikant, who runs Shakti Vahini, an NGO which rescued the girl, said, “We received a specific input that a tribal girl was brought to a clinic for an abortion. We met her and it was during counselling that’s she revealed her story. We have contacted the Resident Commissioner of Jharkhand and have requested the Mahila Samakhya (under the HRD Ministry) in Jharkhand to verify the girl’s address.”

Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast) Meghna Yadav said, “A case has been registered at the Sarita Vihar police station. The matter is under investigation.”

SHALINI NARAYAN IN THE INDIAN EXPRESS

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The NewSlaves

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, FIGHT SLAVERY, JUVENILE JUSTICE, SHAKTI VAHINI, VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN by NNLRJ INDIA on April 18, 2012
The New Slaves

The New Slaves

Debarshi Dasgupta in The Outlook

In  her nine years as a nurse working with rescued domestic workers in Delhi, Mariamma K. thought she had seen the worst. That was until 2010, when she and her colleagues went to rescue a 17-year-old girl from a home in west Delhi. Sangeeta was found with bite marks all over her body. “We were completely shocked. We didn’t know if we were looking at an animal or a human,” recollects Mariamma, who works with Nirmala Niketan, a group fighting for the rights of house-helps.

Her employers initially claimed, quite incredulously, that she was biting herself but that didn’t explain the marks on her neck. They then changed tack—the lady of the house was deemed unstable. “But we didn’t buy that either. Why did she bite only her help and not her children?” argues Mariamma. The matter was later “settled” out of court. The girl’s family got Rs 50,000, after which she was sent back home to Assam.

Mariamma may still be able to recount the worst case of abuse she’s ever seen, but it’s not that easy for volunteers at Delhi’s Domestic Workers’ Forum. For it could be Veena from February last year, whose employer literally chose to dig in her heels—rather, her stilettos—into her back. Or what about Shobha, a 15-year-old from Jharkhand, whose employer, a nurse, branded her chest with a hot iron? Or Hasina from West Bengal, a minor salvaged from a bureaucrat’s house in November last year, whose private parts had been repeatedly prodded with a rolling pin?

Now the picture may look particularly grim in the national capital (the latest case, from last month, is of a tortured 13-year-old Jharkhand girl, locked in by a vacationing doctor couple with frugal rations) but the truth is, across the country, particularly in north India (see list), abuse of domestic helps is on the rise. What has brought about this pattern of deliberate brutality? Is it because the affluent in cities find a deluge of workers in a market that has no checks against their exploitation? Is it the poor, rather negligible conviction rate, the money-conquers-all attitude which has emboldened this cruel streak in city-dwellers? (The latter perhaps is a valid thought; even as they were being charged, the aforementioned doctor couple had the audacity to publicly offer Rs 75,000 to settle the case.)

This is especially true of a nouveau riche middle class who seem to have no empathy with the poor. In fact “most think that by employing a maid, they are doing some service…feeding the poor. There is a lot of aggression, anger among these people”, says social worker Rishi Kant  of Shakti Vahini who has helped rescue many such girls. “At some houses, the employers actually ask us why we are taking them away when they are at least being fed there….”

Another activist, Rakesh Senger, adds “They think they are doing these kids a favour if they pay them Rs 1,000 a month, give them second-hand clothes and feed them scraps.”

Given the recent flare-ups and the outrage (at least in the media), it is a relationship that many now openly characterise as that between a modern master and slave. These are reflected even in minute dealings with the help. Take, for example, the case of Namita Haldar in Calcutta, who works in several homes but is not allowed to use the toilet facilities in any of them. “It doesn’t occur to us to treat them like humans because it is deep-rooted in our psyche to somehow consider them less than human. Just because we are paying them, people think they should get their money’s worth, right down to the last penny,” says Kakuli Deb of Parichiti, a city-based rights group.

Most of this subjugated workforce, of an estimated 90 million domestic workers in the country, comes from impoverished regions in states like Jharkhand, Bengal and Chhattisgarh. It’s no surprise that a substantial number of them are trafficked into big cities to spruce up urban homes, smoothen out the harried lives of city-dwellers. West Bengal alone reported as many as 8,000 missing girls in 2010 and 2011. Hapless girls from the tribal regions are especially in demand, says Sanjay K. Mishra, who helps rehabilitate rescued domestic workers. “They are simple and innocent and, crucially, without a support structure. So abuse is rarely reported.” Often the parents have no idea where the girls have been taken by agencies and, being illiterate, they are open to all sorts of exploitation.

Feeding on this vast market are the numerous, obscure ‘placement agencies’ (some 2,300 in Delhi alone). Employers pay these agencies to hire a help and, in most cases, pay the monthly salary also to the agency instead of the worker.

And while child labour may have a stigma attached, even today most people tend to look the other way. In Calcutta, Mukul Das, who runs a small business in busy Gariahat, says “maid children” are more “obedient”. His last one, 8-year-old Shefali, would clean, sweep, cook and then sleep on the floor. It was apparently a great bargain. Last year, 116 ‘workers’ were rescued from middle-class homes in Delhi; only four of them were over 18. A survey in Mumbai two years back found nearly 60,000 girls between 5-14 employed as domestic workers.

Now there’s a common rationalisation, more so among this very same middle class, that at least these kids are being fed and clothed, that they are lucky to not find themselves in a brothel. But that’s no guarantee that they won’t end up being sexually abused by their employers. Like Chandni, now 18, who says she was raped in Amritsar by her employer’s father-in-law and then raped again by a man in Delhi who promised to help. Recalling her woes, she says she couldn’t even call people back home. “The landline would be locked away when they went out. They would hit me with shoes and I never got a rupee for all my work,” she says. Madhuri Singh, a Delhi journalist who came to report on her case, now employs her. Madhuri explains that the middle class exploits these young girls because they are “voiceless”. “The employers know that it is their voice that is heard among the decision-makers, not the worker’s.”

Ironically, even those in positions to make the lives of workers better are not above inflicting abuse. Recounting one such case, the head of the Andhra chapter of the National Domestic Workers Movement describes how two children were tortured at a retired dig’s home in Hyderabad. The girls, aged 14 and 15, were employed to look after the retired cop’s grandchild. Once when the child was found wandering close to the swimming pool, the dig punished the maids by making them stand neck-deep in the pool an entire night. “When the children managed to escape from the house, the officer filed a case accusing the girls of stealing jewellery. Investigations instead revealed that the girls were physically tortured.”

A major problem with the domestic worker market is the scarce information agencies provide of workers that makes exploitation easier. “Every agency should give a full record of the help they provide. Is she a goat or a showpiece that you can just buy and keep in your home? And if you do employ one, why should it not be recorded somewhere?” asks Subhash Bhatnagar, coordinator of the National Campaign Committee for Unorganised Sector Workers.

While a draft bill to protect the rights of domestic workers was ready as far back as 2008, it’s still lying with the National Commission for Women (NCW). “It’s going to take a long time before it gets enacted into law…many of the decision-makers themselves depend on domestic workers. I won’t be surprised if some of them even employ child workers,” says Bharti Sharma, ex-chairperson of the Delhi Child Welfare Committee.

Similarly, legislation in states too has been stuck. Clara, coordinator of the Tamil Nadu Domestic Workers’ Union, says she had lobbied with a DMK minister in 2007 to fix Rs 30 per hour as minimum wages, but the decision was postponed. “Early last year, the minister told me the decision was further delayed since elections were approaching and the government did not want to antagonise the employers.” Union representatives who met the labour secretary in March were informed that the “issue is under process”. Everyone knows that legislation can take its time but that hardly permits middle-class homes from being zones of inequity and oppression in a free and independent India.

(Names have been changed in most cases to protect privacy)

The Organ Grinders

2004 A 14-year-old girl, working as a help in one of Calcutta’s Golpark homes, is found hanging. Police report it as a case of suicide despite accusations of sexual abuse.

June 2009 Actor Shiney Ahuja allegedly rapes his maid in Mumbai, is later arrested. Granted bail in April 2011.

August 2009 Actress Urvashi Dhanorkar’s 10-year-old maid is rescued with burn injuries on forearms and bruise marks all over.

September 2011 A 12-year-old girl is found charred to death at her employer’s home in Kurnool, AP. Rape allegations follow.

December 2011 A Chennai woman is convicted and fined Rs 50,000 for burning her help in 2008 after she failed to pay back a loan of Rs 15,000.

March 2012 An Indian maid receives a favourable ruling from a New York court, awarded $1.5 mn as compensation after she accused her former employer Neena Malhotra (right), an IFS officer, and her husband of harassment and “slavery”.

March 2012 A 13-year-old girl is rescued from Dwarka, Delhi. Her employers, Drs Sanjay and Sunita Verma, left her locked up while they went off on a vacation to Thailand. She is found with injury marks, including those inflicted by pinching, all over her body. She was apparently surviving on a diet of two rotis and salt.

April 2012 Teenaged domestic help from Bihar raped and physically abused by employer’s children, Nadeem and Fardeen, for over two years. The young girl had burn marks on her hands. Fardeen arrested.

Debarshi Dasgupta in The Outlook

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All work, no play

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, FIGHT SLAVERY, JUVENILE JUSTICE, SHAKTI VAHINI by NNLRJ INDIA on April 14, 2012
Dr. Couple Arrested For Locking Up A Teen

Dr. Couple Arrested For Locking Up A Teen

Employing children as domestics is illegal. Yet, this is one law that is broken with impunity again and again.

By Kalpana Sharma IN THE HINDU

What a way to begin the week after the long Easter weekend. First, we got the news about baby Afreen in Bengaluru, whose father has allegedly beaten her to death. He did this apparently because he wanted a son and was mad at this wife for producing a girl. Then in a village near Jalgaon, Maharashtra, a 19-year-old girl was strangled to death. The chief suspects are her father, uncle and grandmother. The reason: she was in love with a boy from another caste. And in Mumbai, the police arrested a 20-year-old man who was trying to abduct two minor girls.

But distressing as these reports are, the news from Delhi the previous week of the 13-year-old domestic left locked in a flat by her employers who went off to Bangkok is even more chilling. The facts of that case are now well known and even the international media has reported them. The couple, both medical doctors, have been arrested and charged under various provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act, the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, the Child Labour (Prohibition & Regulation) Act and the Indian Penal Code. The girl, rescued by the fire brigade when neighbours reported seeing her on the balcony crying, has now been taken to a shelter. And the man who brought her to Delhi from Jharkhand has also been arrested.

Subterranean cities

This story, however, does not end here. It is the beginning of another story, one that gives us a glimpse into a nether-world, one where children are kidnapped, stolen or sold into servitude from some of the poorest parts of India; a world where these children have no choice, no voice. When we think of trafficking, we usually think of the sex trade. In fact, many children are trafficked into domestic and other forms of labour and are never detected.

The story of the 13-year-old girl in Delhi is not an exception. Every now and then similar stories are reported in the media. In Mumbai, we still remember the horrific tale of 10-year-old Sonu who was tortured by her employers and eventually died from the injuries.

But there are two aspects of this story that are particularly worrying: indifference and impunity. Let us take the latter first. In October 2006, the government included domestic work in the Child Labour Act. Earlier, children under 14 years were prohibited from working in a number of hazardous industries that were identified. After 2006, the law banned children from being employed as domestics or to work in dhabas and restaurants. Yet, many like the educated professional couple in this case, think nothing of breaking this law.

Usually, when people like them are asked why they employ children, they come out with a set of standard excuses: “We were looking after the child as if she was our own”. “We were feeding and clothing her, something she would not get in her village”. “She is like a member of our family”, etc. But the point is that they are breaking the law. And with impunity. The fact that so many affluent and middle class people do this is because they are confident that the law applies to others, not to people like them. In fact, they firmly believe that most laws apply to others, not to them.

Unacceptable numbers

Data is not easily available on this issue but roughly 20 per cent of the 12.6 million child workers in India (these are official figures and therefore a gross underestimation) are domestic workers. Of these, the majority are boys. But girls too work as domestics and are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. Both boys and girls suffer various levels of physical abuse.

The other side of impunity is indifference. How many of us turn our faces away when we see a woman being harassed, a child being beaten, a law being flouted? No one wants to be involved. I wonder how many people in the housing colony where this couple lived were aware that a child was working in that house? What stopped any of these people from reporting this to Childline, which has a well-advertised number (1098) that anyone can call and an email address where a complaint can be sent?

We are not helping any children, including our own, if we justify employing children to work in our homes. We are flouting not just the child labour laws but also the constitutional provision that gives every child the right to compulsory and free education. Sadly, in India, being educated and part of the better-off class does not necessarily add up to enlightened attitudes. As with dowry, the more we learn, the more we earn, the more we slip back in our attitudes.

sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com

By Kalpana Sharma IN THE HINDU

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Rising demand for helps has led to increase in trafficking of girls

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, CHILD RIGHTS, FIGHT SLAVERY, JUVENILE JUSTICE, SEX ABUSE, SHAKTI VAHINI by NNLRJ INDIA on March 31, 2012
Rising demand for helps has led to increase in trafficking of girls

Rising demand for helps has led to increase in trafficking of girls

HINDUSTAN TIMES

NEW DELHI: The rescue of the 13year-old girl working as a domestic help, has once again highlighted the increasing incidents of trafficking of minor girls to be employed as domestic helps. In this case too, the victim was brought to Delhi from Gumla district in Jharkhand by her uncle’s friend.

“I was brought to Delhi by one Mahadev, who knew my uncle Narayan Sahu. Mahadev handed me over to one Mukesh, owner of a placement agency in Punjabi Bagh. Mukesh asked me to work at a flat in Dwarka,” the victim said in her statement. Police said the trafficking of minor girls had increased since there was a huge demand for domestic helps in Delhi and the NCR. Organised gangs bring minors from Jharkhand and West Bengal and later sell them to placement agencies in Delhi, the police said. There are 2,300 placement agencies in Delhi out of which 325 are registered under the Commercial Establishment Act.

This registration is not mandatory, so not many get themselves registered. “A number of these placement agencies are in Shakurpur in northwest Delhi,” a senior police officer said. Officials of Delhi government’s labour department said that more than 1,000 juveniles — both boys and girls — are rescued from different areas working in different occupations by the government’s task force every year. And the number is only increasing.

“There is an increase in the number every year because there is greater awareness among people that kids should not work and such people inform the police and other departments if they come across such a case. Also, our list now incudes more occupations, in which juveniles are prohibited, and hence our catchment area has increased,” a senior labour department official said.

The official said that each district in Delhi had a task force.

“Kids who are rescued are rehabilitated and repatriated to the home district,” the officer said.“but the unfortunate part is that parents send their kids to work due to their poor financial condition. There have been innumerable examples where parents have sent them back to work again,” the official added.

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Most cases are not detected

Posted in ANTI TRAFFICKING, FIGHT SLAVERY, JUVENILE JUSTICE, SHAKTI VAHINI by NNLRJ INDIA on March 31, 2012
Most cases are not detected

Most cases are not detected

TIMES OF INDIA / DURGESH NANDAN JHA

NEW DELHI: Back to back cases of doctors employing and abusing minors may have shocked the city but child welfare experts say exploitation of poor children from Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal is rampant among the middle class here.

Activists and NGOs say hundreds of children from impoverished families in these states are rescued in the capital every year. Placement agencies lure them from home with promises of work as fulltime domestic helps but leave them exposed to every kind of abuse – financial, mental, physical and sexual.

“In 2011, we got 25 cases of domestic child workers who were abused by employers and placement agencies. This year, till March, we have received nine such cases,” said Raaj Mangal Prasad, chairperson of Child Welfare Committee (CWC), Lajpat Nagar. There are six CWC offices in the city’s nine districts.

“Only 10% of the actual number of children employed as domestic helps are identified and rescued due to lack of monitoring by the labour department, which is supposed to conduct raids regularly,” said Prasad.

Rakesh Sengar, activist with Bachpan Bachao Aandolan, said children are commonly employed as domestics in metro cities. “Middle class double-income families tend to employ children as full-time domestics as they are docile and not demanding.”

Sengar said his organization rescues 10-20 children every month. “The culprits are mostly from the middle class: doctors, professors and businessmen. They are aware that child labour is illegal and punishable yet flout the rules for their convenience.”

Nishi Kant, executive director of the NGO Shakti Vahini said oversight and absence of registration requirements had led to the unregulated growth of placement agencies.

Another activist said, “Employers need to be careful in determining the age of domestic helps and the possibility of their being trafficked. An employer can be jailed if the child help complains about forced labour and denial of minimum wages”.

Most cases are not detected

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