The verdict – Editorial (Apr 11, 2012, Indian Express)

The special court’s verdicts on the killings in Ode over two days in the aftermath of Godhra in Gujarat 2002, convicting 23 and upholding the conspiracy charge, could be seen as unexceptionable in a system governed by the rule of law. But that would be missing the fraught context of the still unfolding process in Gujarat. It would be underplaying the tremendous grit and commitment the Supreme Court has shown in ensuring, against all odds, that justice is done. A little over a decade after it was convulsed by violence in 2002, two narratives can be seen to be playing out simultaneously in the state.

In one, the state is smoothly moving on from its past, as it posts achievements in governance and development. In the other, the process of justice for the victims of the mass communal violence of 2002 moves ahead, but less smoothly, in fits and starts. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi strenuously projects himself as the hero of the first narrative. But there can be no doubt that the leading role, in insulating and protecting the procedures of justice from possible derailment, in the second story is played by the judiciary, led by the Supreme Court.

Look again at the Ode cases and the apex court’s role stands out at every turn. In 2003, on a petition alleging bias in police investigations, the SC stayed proceedings in cases, including the Ode massacres. Then in 2008, it appointed the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe nine of the most serious cases. Ode was one of them. SIT chief R.K. Raghavan was given full powers to pick the probe team and special public prosecutors. Crucially, the apex court also directed the SIT to ensure witness protection. In 2009, the SC ordered special fast-track trial courts for the SIT cases. It went further than that.

At one point, in an extraordinary move, the court appointed an amicus curiae, a “friend of the court”, to go through investigation papers, meet witnesses and police officers and submit his own report, bypassing the SIT. Verdicts, and some semblance of closure, have been delivered in three of the nine key Godhra and post-Godhra cases. Countless others await conclusion, including Naroda Patiya, in which former Gujarat minister Maya Kodnani and VHP leader Jaideep Patel are among the accused, and the Gulbarg Society massacre, in which VHP and Bajrang Dal workers allegedly played a role. In the end, for it to be meaningful or enduring, the narrative of development must find a way to connect to the story of justice in Gujarat.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/935175/

SEE ALSO:

• Mob frenzy in Gujarat: Towards creating a strong deterrent – Editorial (Apr 11, 2012, The Tribune)
  http://www.tribuneindia.com/2012/20120411/edit.htm#2
• Deterrence to Rioters – Editorial (Apr 11, 2012, Nav Hind Times)
  http://www.navhindtimes.in/opinion/deterrence-rioters
• Justice will be done – Editorial (Apr 11, 2012, The Hindu)
  http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article3300978.ece
• Justice tastes bitter to village – By Swati Bhan Anand (Apr 12, 2012, Deccan Herald)
  http://www.deccanherald.com/content/241633/justice-tastes-bitter-village.html

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Gulberg Society case: Gujarat highlights why the Bill against communal violence is needed – By ET Bureau (Apr 12, 2012, Economic Times)

The special court’s verdict in the communal killings in Ode and the Special Investigation Team’s (SIT) closure of investigation in the Gulberg Society massacre – after finding no evidence to prosecute CM Narendra Modi and top political leaders, bureaucrats and police officers – highlight the laboriousness of delivering some measure of justice to the victims of the carnage in Gujarat in 2002. The SIT’s report is by no means a clean chit to Mr Modi. The legal process would, in all likelihood, continue in the Gulberg Society case. Besides, the SIT simply failed to find sufficient evidence, something that would happen if evidence has been destroyed.

Some months ago, the state government itself admitted that it had destroyed what seemed like critical records relating to the riots. And all the murky twists and turns that have been witnessed in the investigations actually reinforce the notion that the state administration is out to subvert justice. But that is precisely what also makes bringing the law of the land to bear on the perpetrators of the 2002 violence in Gujarat more important. Overall, such has been the abysmal track record of delivering justice in riot cases that even partial convictions, that too after a decade, in a couple of cases relating to the post-Godhra killings stand out.

Given this, the passage of the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill assumes critical importance in a country often ravaged by such riots. This is necessary because even the delayed justice in cases like Ode is only partial – the fact that only a few Muslim families have returned to the area where the slaughter was carried out makes talk of ‘moving on’ and peace having returned sound absurd.

The Bill should be seen as one of the more significant ones in India’s post-Independence history. For, while the end-result should be ending the culture of immunity fostered by the political class in communal riot cases, coming down heavily on instigating or carrying out such riots, the rehabilitation of victims must aim at their renewing their lives in full measure. Meanwhile, justice will continue to be a work in slow progress.

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-12/news/31331292_1_riot-cases-gulberg-society-post-godhra-killings

SEE ALSO:

• Hate-mongers are an anachronism – By Sushil Bhan (Apr 13, 2012, Tehelka)
  http://www.tehelka.com/story_main52.asp?filename=Fw130412Hate.asp
• Out, Damned Spot! – By Ashis Nandy (Apr 23, 2012, Outlook)
  http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280557
• What SIT report means for — Narendra Modi, Zakia Jafri, other cases – By Jumana Shah (Apr 11, 2012, DNA India)
  http://www.dnaindia.com/print710.php?cid=1674391
• Despite exoneration, Narendra Modi cannot play national role – By Amulya Ganguli (Apr 14, 2012, Yahoo)
  http://in.news.yahoo.com/despite-exoneration-narendra-modi-cannot-play-national-role-093556377.html

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Shutting the school doors on the Muslim child – By Hem Borker (Apr 5, 2012, The Hindu)

That a news report in The Hindu titled “In Delhi’s nursery classes, Muslim children are a rarity” (March 19, 2012), found mention in the Rajya Sabha the same day, leading to “heated arguments” and a “verbal duel” in the Upper House, is symptomatic of the polarisation of public discourse on the education of Muslims. Almost any discussion on the subject slides into binaries: religious vs secular, exclusion vs appeasement, rights vs politics, reality vs rhetoric, and conservatism vs systemic discrimination. In 2009-10, as part of the National CRY Fellowship Programme, I had conducted a series of interviews with 20 Muslim families residing in Zakir Nagar, New Delhi, on the question of what shaped their schooling choices for their children. Unanimously, the parents regarded modern mainstream education as the single most important factor which safeguarded their children’s future and clearly articulated a preference for sending their children to reputed private schools. However their narratives echoed the contesting dilemmas many faced on account of “being Muslim”; dilemmas which illustrate the manner in which the increasing communalisation of social space subtly limits choices or renders them non-existent in something as fundamental as education.

This statement highlights the increasing sense of helplessness and exasperation parents feel at the difficulty their children face in gaining admission to private schools. Many talked about their “feeling” that private schools have some sort of a “prefixed quota of just this much and no more Muslims”; some parents cited how the neighbourhood points seemed to have marginal weightage in the case of private schools nearby, while others talked about having to use “jugaad” to get their children admitted saying that this was not an option available to the ordinary Muslim. Many talked about consciously opting for Christian schools rather than the Hinduised regular public schools, as, at some level, Christian schools are “good” and respect minority sentiments. They also explained the choice in terms of pragmatism as Christian schools are generally convents, have a better command over the English language, and have a strong emphasis on discipline.

Parents shared experiences of their children being “unnecessarily picked on, classified in front of their peers and harassed by teachers.” In many of the interviews, parents repeatedly made references to derogatory comments made by teachers on the eating and dressing habits (headscarf or extra-long skirts) of Muslim children. This was corroborated by the children when I asked them about things they did not like about school. Many of them talked about how they did not like being singled out (on account of their religion), examples being a teacher adding “Miyan” to the child’s name while taking attendance (“I don’t know why my teacher keeps adding ‘Miyan’ to my name … everyone has started saying that”) or the cricket coach’s insinuating reprimands (“Isko bouncer mat dena, sar tod dega … ye sab garam mizaz ke hote hain”) or as a 10-year-old girl said, “Nobody in school wants to play hide-and-seek with me. Everyone says Muslims cannot be trusted with secrets.”

Parents described themselves as being very “conscious,” “mindful” and “careful” about the choices they were making vis-a-vis their children’s education – what the school environment was like, where to send their children to play or for dini talim. The choices available often lay at two ends of the spectrum – “excessively religious” people in the neighbourhood who kept on preaching Islamiyat or the excessively modern who tried to act like “everyone else.” For many parents the biggest worry was how to straddle these two extremes. Their responses constantly brought up the dichotomy of the “Good Muslim” and the “Bad Muslim” and the difficulty they faced in ensuring that their children are brought up in “Muslim ways” without falling into the “conservative trap.” In fact this concern was shared at various points in the interviews. Parents would juxtapose their own education back home (generally where they were a part of larger families in a more “Muslim milieu”) with that of their children’s education (in a nuclear set up in Delhi, where, as parents, they consciously tried to familiarise their children with the culture). Many parents mentioned how in their families, “family values” included orienting their children towards religion and conformity with a certain moral discipline. These situations often put the parents in an awkward position limiting their options to Muslim managed schools which respected their culture but did not provide the secular grounding required for the children not to feel alienated in the future.

Many parents expressed the difficulties they faced in choosing appropriate schools for their girls. For parents, many of whom aspired to remain true to their native roots located in rural or semi-urban Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, it was difficult to locate schools which ensured that their girls could avail the benefits of a modern secular education that provided some degree of certainty of access to respectable marriages and, if need be, appropriate employment but did not corrupt them into western ways; an institution which was not co-educational, had a modest dress code and was located nearby to ensure that the parents could reach them quickly in case of a “threatening” (danga-fasad) eventuality. I noted that in the case of girls, unlike boys, in the event of an absence of a combination of these criteria the parents generally made compromises on the quality of schooling and sent the girls to nearby (often unrecognised) schools within Jamia Nagar which promised girls education (not co-education), held classes in Urdu and sometimes imparting dini talim, and had the salwar kameez as the uniform. But the drawback was that these schools were not necessarily recognised by boards such as the CBSE/ICSE or had classes up till class 12. While these daily struggles are in no way representative of the Muslim experience of education, they do highlight the vicious nature of the problem. On one side the policy discourse refers to educational backwardness as one of the main causes for real and/or perceived alienation of Muslims and acknowledges inclusive education as a panacea; on the other, these real life situations demonstrate the everyday issues Muslims face in accessing these very opportunities, leading to further isolation, exclusion and excessive reliance on “Muslim managed services and networks.”

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3281463.ece

SEE ALSO:

• Nitish wants to ride on charged communal wave next poll? – By Mumtaz Alam Falahi (Apr 13, 2012, Twocircles.net)
  http://twocircles.net/2012apr13/nitish_wants_ride_charged_communal_wave_next_poll.html

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The Raja Who Stole From The Poor – By Ashish Khetan (Apr 21, 2012, Tehelka)

A little more than a month ago, Akhilesh Yadav, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, earned a landslide victory on the idea of hope: Ummeed ki cycle. He had promised clean governance and a corruption-free government. When he refused to give the dreaded DP Yadav a ticket, he sent a signal that he meant business. But some of his gloss was lost on the day he was sworn in. His inclusion of the notorious Raja Bhaiya in his Cabinet as prisons and food and civil supplies minister created an uproar in the media. If Raja Bhaiya’s appointment was driven by political expediency, here’s incontrovertible proof why Akhilesh must confront and overcome that expediency. TEHELKA now exposes why he should not even be in the Cabinet and definitely not as food minister again. His rightful place, it appears, should be in jail and not the Uttar Pradesh Secretariat. In the last Samajwadi Party regime (2003-07), under Mulayam Singh Yadav, Raja Bhaiya was food minister and presided over the crucial PDS scheme. In a shocking revelation, a close aide of Raja Bhaiya has told the CBI and the Supreme Court that in his last stint, the controversial minister had presided over a well-oiled network of stealing and smuggling of PDS foodgrain and made a personal fortune of over Rs 100 crore in less than four years. The total magnitude of the foodgrain scam, which stretches over a period of more than a decade, could run up to a staggering Rs 2 lakh crore. To support his claims, the witness has produced a sensational diary in which entries of illicit money received were meticulously maintained. And – in an act of utter brazenness – each illegal entry, the entire illegal book-keeping has allegedly been countersigned by Raja Bhaiya’s wife. This is a story that shows how the idea of electoral democracy is corrupted and subverted. This story is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with our representative democracy – the abuse of power and authority, criminalisation of electoral politics and the nexus of mass leaders with murderers and gangsters. This is how the story unfolds.

Sometime in December 2011, Rajiv Yadav, 38, who was the public relations officer (PRO) of Kunwar Raghuraj Pratap Singh, notorious by the name of Raja Bhaiya, walked into the CBI office at Hazratganj, Lucknow, and handed over a copy of a diary. It was the diary that Yadav and Ashok Kumar, another senior officer of the Secretariat Administration cadre, had maintained between 2006 and ’07 while they were part of the official staff of Raja Bhaiya, who was the food minister. Some of this money was invested in properties and luxury cars. Yadav has provided the details of two such properties of which he has personal knowledge: bungalows in Green Park, New Delhi, and MG Road, Lucknow. “In 2004-05, a trust by the name of Ramjanki Trust was registered at Allahabad in which Raja Bhaiya and his family members were trustees. Some money was transferred to the trust with which a bungalow was leased at 214, MG Marg, Lucknow. In 2007, a bungalow at 7-B, Green Park Extension in Delhi was purchased in the name of Raja Bhaiya’s wife,” Yadav said in his affidavit. For almost four years, Yadav and, in his absence, Kumar, had meticulously kept records and made diary entries of the cash received from the sale of stolen foodgrain and kerosene, which fair price shops (FPS) were allocated at subsidised rates under the Public Distribution System (PDS). Yadav has submitted one such diary pertaining to the period of 2006-07 to the CBI. As minister, Raja Bhaiya’s core responsibility was to oversee the functioning of the PDS and ensure that the subsidised foodgrain was efficiently and honestly distributed to the rural and urban poor, a majority of them living below the poverty line. “These stolen articles were either smuggled to countries like Bangladesh and Nepal or sold in the black market of other states,” Yadav told the CBI in a sworn affidavit.

According to Yadav, the money was collected by Raja Bhaiya’s four important aides: Akshay Pratap Singh alias Gopal Singh (who was at the time a Samajwadi Party MP from Pratapgarh), Yashvant Singh (the then Member of Legislative Council), Jayesh Prasad (who was then a Samajwadi MLC and at present a BSP MLC) and Rohit Singh (Raja Bhaiya’s driver). The money was handed over to Yadav, who used to stay at Raja Bhaiya’s personal bungalow at Shahnajaf Road in Lucknow. During his entire tenure as a minister, Raja Bhaiya used this address as his official residence. “Soon after being sworn in as the food and civil supplies minister in 2004, my minister told me that in the first week of every month, the above four would hand over the cash collected from the PDS mafia and state employees, which I, in turn, was supposed to hand over to the minister’s wife Bhanvi Kumari,” Yadav told the CBI. But before handing the cash to Kumari, Yadav made entries of all the cash inflow in a diary maintained by him. “For the sake of record-keeping and clarity, in case there was any dispute with regard to money collected, Bhanvi Kumari used to countersign all the entries,” Yadav told CBI Superintendent of Police Sanjay Ratan at his Lucknow office last December. Three months later, Yadav retold this chilling story to TEHELKA in Delhi.

The diary shows that in a period of less than 15 months between 2006 and ’07, Raja Bhaiya had earned roughly Rs 40 crore in cash coming in from the smuggling of PDS foodgrain and kerosene, from the monthly fixed amount received from the Weights and Measures wing and transfers and postings of departmental officials. Raja Bhaiya was minister for around 40 months. Yadav told TEHELKA that he had personally received over Rs 100 crore from the stealing of foodgrain meant for the poor during this period. “The entire money was handed over to his wife,” said Yadav. According to Yadav, as soon as he received the money, it was sorted and handed over to Kumari. TEHELKA asked Yadav why the money was not directly handed over to Kumari instead of Yadav acting as a go-between. He replied that in Raja Bhaiya’s family, the women avoid interacting with men who were not part of the family and that’s why he was appointed as a buffer. “Also it would have perhaps been embarrassing for mantriji to expose his wife to the daily collection of money,” said Yadav.

Raja Bhaiya had allegedly also devised an innovative modus operandi of converting some of this black money into white. Yadav has disclosed in his affidavit that bogus insurance policies and bank accounts were opened in the name of the teachers and others employed at the private schools owned by Raja Bhaiya’s family. “More than Rs 7.5 crore was deposited over a period of four years in these insurance policies, which on maturity was handed back to Raja Bhaiya’s family. One such policy was also opened in my name,” Yadav had said. He has given the CBI the name of the insurance company and the agent code under which the policies were opened. This affidavit has now been produced before the Supreme Court in an ongoing petition demanding a court-monitored CBI probe into the scam. In the same affidavit, Yadav has affirmed that luxury SUVs, such as Lexus, Ford Endeavour, Toyota Fortuner and Mitsubishi Pajero, were bought with this money. “Most of the cars were registered in benami names,” he said. A copy of the sensational diary has reached the apex court. TEHELKA perused this diary and found that detailed entries of money received from different divisions and districts were maintained date-wise. Some entries also carry subheads under which the money was categorised. For instance, one of the pages is divided into four columns under the subheading PDS. This page has entries of the alleged money received from Lucknow, Moradabad, Kanpur and Bareilly divisions. It shows that around Rs 58 lakh was received from the pilferage of PDS foodgrain in January-July 2006 from Lucknow, Moradabad and Kanpur. The same page shows that a total of Rs 13.6 lakh was received from Bareilly district in February-July 2006. The next page records a receipt of Rs 13.5 lakh from the smuggling of foodgrain from Meerut, Saharanpur, Allahabad and Varanasi divisions in February-July 2006. The following page carries the entries of Rs 40.70 lakh collected from Goraphkur, Basti and Devipatan divisions. …

http://tehelka.com/story_main52.asp?filename=Ws100412EXCLUSIVE.asp

SEE ALSO:

• Off The Blocks – By Smruti Koppikar (Apr 2, 2012, Outlook)
  http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280324

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The danger is closing in – Editorial (Apr 11, 2012, Hindustan Times)

The recent kidnapping of two Italians (one of them has been released) and a legislator in Orissa by the Maoists has again brought up a question that has been confronting successive Indian governments for the last 25 years: how should the Indian State tackle a hostage crisis, be it involving the Maoists or terrorists? Should the State negotiate with such groups or follow a no-negotiation policy on hostages? Even though a 2006 guideline of the Union home ministry bars negotiations in a hostage situation, the hard reality for a democratic country like India, with competing political forces at play, is that a firm no is fraught with difficulty.

Starting with the 1989 abduction of Rubaiya Sayeed by Kashmiri militants to last year’s abduction of IAS officer V Krishna, not to forget the infamous IC 814 case, parties in power have faced enormous pressure to negotiate. There is another facet to such cases: the families of the security forces often oppose releasing arrested Maoists/terrorists in exchange for the abducted people, as we have seen this time too. Thanks to such different and competing emotions and demands, India can no longer afford the luxury of continuing with a policy of ad hocism on this crucial issue.

There is no dishonour in negotiating – even the so-called ‘hard’ State, Israel, had to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners to get back the abducted soldier Gilad Shalit last year. But what India needs, even to negotiate effectively, are professionals who know the business well. For example, the American Federal Bureau of Investigation has a crisis negotiation unit that manages such requirements. So does Israel. But unfortunately in India, negotiations are left to well-meaning individuals who may have sympathies for the Maoist cause. While the political leaders should decide on the ‘give and take’ details, negotiators should be employed to be the go-between and also to buy crucial time.

India has not managed a unified policy till now because of the lack of a cohesive political approach on security-related issues. While the BJD-led Orissa government has been complaining about the fact that the Congress-led UPA government has not been helpful enough in tackling the latest hostage crisis, let’s not forget how its chief minister, Naveen Patnaik, along with West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, objected to the setting up of the proposed anti-terror hub, the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC), saying that it would infringe upon the states’ powers. It is in the interest of all that India takes a unified approach against terror, no matter where it emanates from. We cannot start putting the house in order when the danger is at the door. We have to keep it fortified well in advance.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/839101.aspx

SEE ALSO:

• ‘Freeing hardcore Maoists will be an insult to cops’ – Sawarmal Sharma tells Prakhar Jain (Apr 21, 2012, Tehelka)
  http://tehelka.com/story_main52.asp?filename=Ne210412Freeing.asp
• A Reminder To The Sage Of Bengaluru – By John Dayal (Mar 31, 2012, Countercurrents)
  http://countercurrents.org/dayal310312.htm

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Inside Slave City – By Debarshi Dasgupta, Dola Mitra, and others (Apr 23, 2012, 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 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.…

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280558

SEE ALSO:

• Young & vulnerable – By T.K. Rajalakshmi (Mar 24, 2012, Frontline)
  http://flonnet.com/fl2906/stories/20120406290609500.htm
• Barefoot: Their discovery of India – By Harsh Mander (Apr 7, 2012, The Hindu)
  http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Harsh_Mander/article3290891.ece

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