Bonded Child Labor in the Beedi Industry in India

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Bonded Child Labor in the Beedi Industry in India

        “My sister is ten years old. Every morning at seven she goes to the bonded labor man, and every night at nine she comes home. He treats her badly; he hits her if he thinks she is working slowly or if she talks to the other children, he yells at her, he comes looking for her if she is sick and cannot go to work. I feel this is very difficult for her…For six hundred rupees I can bring her home…We don’t have six hundred rupees…we will never have six hundred rupees.”

  • Nine-year-old beedi (cigarette) roller.

        India has the largest number of working children in the world ranging from incredible numbers of sixty to one hundred and fifteen million children. They have been working since they were small children, around four or five years old. When they hit adulthood, many of them would be irreversibly sick and some even deformed. They would be exhausted old men and women likely to die before the hit fifty years old. These children do not go to school and they will never be able to read or write. Most of these children work in stone quarries, working in the agricultural fields, picking rags in the streets of the city or as domestic servants for more than sixteen hours a day. They earn very little and are abused a great deal more.

        Bonded child labor is the term given when children must work in harsh condition in order to repay a debt. The parents usually cause these debts as they take out loans to the local moneylender in the town. To repay these debts, the parents send their children to work for the employer. These debts, when looked at from the Western side of the world, are reasonably modest ranging from five hundred to eight thousand rupees. Two thousand rupees is the equivalent to thirty five US dollars. These loans are taken out as a bare necessity for the parents of these children. Without this money provided in these loans, there would probably be no food in the table when the children come home from working. Due to the highly rated interest charges on these loans, the children’s low wages are never enough to pay them off. They are carried over to the children of the children and the cycle will continue on and on.

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        This cycle has been going on in India for the past fifteen hundred years. Debt bondage has coexisted with formal slavery in India. In 1843, The British abolished slavery in the Anti Slavery Act in India. As the slaves had no knowledge of any other skill, they traded their status to bonded servants. This is due to the fact that the British didn’t abolish bondage servitude and thus it still remains today.

        The poor rural Indians have very few options to borrow money. If they do have a bank in close proximity, they rarely qualify to be able to ...

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