India’s silent crisis

Every morning, a fleet of luxury buses descends on the villages of Bihar, one of India’s eastern states, also one of its poorest.

Against the backdrop of some of the most destitute districts in the country, the buses look extra grandiose. As they cruise through, the convoy draws in dozens of children, alluring them with the comfort of padded seats and air-conditioning, and with the vague promise of a brighter tomorrow.

When the COVID-19 pandemic found its way to India, the government put the country under a strict lockdown, leaving millions of migrant workers jobless and their dependents hungry. The second wave of infections that has hit India harder has pushed more than 200 million into poverty.

It is exactly this environment, heavy with destitution and hopelessness, that child traffickers thrive in.

“Traffickers have an organized network around the village,” says Suresh Kumar, executive director of Centre Direct, a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Gaya, Bihar. Most traffickers have been in business for decades and even have local agents working to scout out potential targets in villages.

“It is unrecognizable from a distance,” adds Zaid Hussain, program manager with Justice Ventures International, a non-profit based in Gaya, Bihar. “Traffickers make adults sit near the bus windows. But on the top sleeper berth, there are more children than adults. They take 50-70 children each day.”

Pervasive problem

Ashish Manjhi was just 14 when he fell for this ploy. In 2014, child traffickers found their way to his neighborhood in Serghati, a town along the southern border of Bihar.

Manjhi belongs to the Musahar community, a Hindu scheduled caste so marginalized they chase rats just to secure a meal. In Bihar alone, there are over 2 million Musahars, most of whom are landless and often have no choice but to work as farm laborers.

Barely earning enough to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, most Musahars haven’t had the chance to go to school. As a result, literacy rate in the community is among the lowest in India.

At the time, Manjhi had heard that some people were offering children from his village the opportunity to study. In exchange for just a couple of hours’ work per day, he’d be able to go to school. Manjhi thought it was a great deal. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to support my family,” he says.

He didn’t know that he was walking straight into a trap. Before taking him, the traffickers paid Manjhi Rs 2,000 (US$27) in advance – a ploy to keep him debt-ridden. He was held hostage as a bonded laborer for two years in the infamous bangle-making factories of Jaipur, in the northwestern state of Rajasthan. Manjhi was made to work every day for 12-14 hours, embellishing each glass bangle in gemstones.

The ploy that caught Manjhi in 2014 has only grown over the years, reaching a fever pitch during the COVID-19 crisis. Using poverty and desperation as leverage, traffickers intimidate parents to surrender their children to them, sending them off to cities for cheap labor. The buses in Bihar are merely the next frontier of the scheme.

“After the lockdown, the traffickers provided back-to-back transits and luxury buses in the villages of Northeast Bihar that directly took children to Haryana, Rajasthan, Telangana, Jammu Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh. Most children are from the Musahar community,” Kumar says. In Bihar particularly, activists say that child trafficking boomed during the pandemic, exacerbated by weakened child protection services.

As a result, NGOs have had to pick up the slack. Between March and August 2020, Childline, the national helpline for children, made nearly 200,000 rescues; of those, around 7,000 were related to child labor. Just in 6 months of the pandemic, Childline fielded almost 3 million distress calls.

In February 2021, Hussain of Justice Ventures International rescued 97 working minors from the brick kilns of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh. He says that they saw more working children there than there were adults, a rare occurrence that he had “never seen before.

A month later, in March, Kumar with Centre Direct rescued 500 child laborers from a bangle-making factory in Jaipur, not unlike the one Manjhi was sent to in 2014. Almost all of the rescued children belonged to the Musahar community, too.

Inefficient solutions

Child labor and trafficking has been a long-standing issue in India. A decade ago, in 2011, there were 10.1 million child laborers in the country, the highest in South Asia. If India were a country of only child laborers, it would still be more populous than Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Nepal.

The United Nations and the International Labour Organization declared 2021 as the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor, but such a lofty goal is simply too steep for many countries. According to a 2012 study, states fighting child labor may be doing so through inefficient means.

For most low-income countries, it appears that laws and regulations for minimum age at employment have little value, as household factors tend to be a stronger driving force behind child labor in these contexts.

In any case, the enforcement of such regulations is mostly weak in these countries, anyway. Other studies have also shown that when bans are imperfectly enforced, they only raise the costs of hiring children, as employers anticipate facing stiff fines or other penalties when caught using child labor.

Rahul Sakpal, professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, says: “During the pandemic, there were changes made to labor codes, allowing factories to work for more than 12 hours. This will require more cheap labor.”

Empowering communities seems to be a better, more cause-oriented solution to the problem. Families that know their rights and are aware of the dangers of child labor will be less likely to send their children off on the luxury buses, so the logic goes.

In the case of the Musahar children, the first step in rehabilitation to ensure their enrollment in government schools. In line with this, the Indian government, through the Ministry of Women and Child Development, has instituted the Integrated Child Protection Scheme, which aims to strengthen the overall child protection system in the country.

Unfortunately, the program, already weak to start with, had been hamstrung by COVID-19. Before the pandemic, only 41 children in Bihar received sponsorships under the Child Protection Scheme. During the pandemic, not a single child got compensation, says Hussain.

After rescue, children from the Musahar community are also entitled to immediate financial assistance of Rs 20,000 (US$273), with another Rs 180,000 (US$2,457) to follow after a summary trial. But budget restrictions have made this compensation more of a pipe dream, and many rescued children reach adulthood without receiving their promised aid.

Manjhi, the boy who was trafficked in 2014, has yet to receive his full compensation, too. Four years after his rescue, and even after the traffickers had come and threatened his family, Manjhi is still waiting for the second tranche of his aid.

Life has been cruel to Manjhi. He was born into poverty and out of desperation, had been tricked into forced labor. Even now, as he tries to settle back into normalcy, justice remains elusive for him — a fact chalked up to administrative hiccups and fiscal shortages.

Still, a brighter future does not seem too far-fetched for him. After his rescue in 2016, Manjhi beat the odds and went to school. Today, he is one of the very few Musahars to graduate. ●

Sana Ali is an independent journalist based in Delhi, India. She writes about health, gender, and child rights.