By Amelia Gentleman
CALCUTTA, India — Seven days a week, 8-year-old Jasmina K. rises before dawn to fetch water for the household where she works as a maid. She washes, sweeps and hauls until about 11 at night, when she lies down to sleep on the floor by the bathroom door.
Her employers have little patience with her exhaustion.
“I get tired and forget things, so they hit me,” she said, her eyes cast down. “They want the shoes polished. If I don’t do it fast enough, they hit me with a cooking spoon. They want to go to the toilet. If I don’t get the water fast enough, I get a beating.”
Jasmina has been a member of India’s child labor force for more than a year now. After her father died, she said, her mother sent her and her sister from their West Bengal village to work as maids here. Each month, she is paid 100 rupees, or about $2.25.
India has no outright ban on child labor and had long allowed the employment of children under 14 in all but what are deemed “hazardous” occupations. But last October a stricter law took effect; it prohibits the employment of children under 14 in hotels and restaurants, and as domestic servants.
Five months later, children’s rights advocates say, the law has had little effect. Under-age children, mostly girls, are as in demand as ever to be maids and nannies.
“Because of the booming economy and the spread of the nuclear family, we’ve seen a rise in demand for domestic help at a time when it’s becoming more expensive to employ people,” said Surina Rajan of the International Labor Organization. “So families are looking for a cheaper option.”
Hiring an obedient 8-year-old, fresh from India’s rural heartland, is a simple matter. Impoverished villagers willingly turn their children over to middlemen who promise a better life in the cities, children’s advocacy groups say.
“Placement agencies in Delhi and Mumbai are growing like mushrooms,” said Manabendra Nath Ray of Save the Children U.K. “It is an extremely lucrative business. This is a slave trade. Parents are, directly or indirectly, selling their children.”
The Indian government estimates that 12 million children under 14 are employed; children’s advocates say the figure could be closer to 60 million. It is unclear how many of these children work as maids.
Children’s rights advocates fault the government for not cracking down hard enough on the recruiters of children and not helping parents to keep their children at home. They have called for more educational and job opportunities in the struggling countryside of West Bengal and the neighboring states of Bihar and Jharkhand, the source of most of the children in domestic service. “We are disappointed,” Mr. Ray said.
Officials with the Ministry of Labor and Employment said it would take time before the effects of the law were evident. Shahid Meezan, director of the ministry’s child labor division, said that dealing with under-age domestic servants was harder than, say, with under-age factory workers. “You can’t just start raiding people’s private homes,” he said. “You have to tread carefully.”
Because the government is moving so slowly to require compliance with the law, advocacy groups have tried to at least encourage employers to treat the children they have illegally hired better. One program, for instance, demands that children be given time off for education.
Save the Children has also set up several antitrafficking committees in West Bengal to disrupt the supply network through grass-roots action, including educating parents about the risks to their children and urging the police to enforce the law.
At the weekly meeting of a committee in Rajbati, a hamlet of mud huts two hours’ drive southwest of Calcutta, a dozen teachers, parents and village officials said they were fighting a three-tier system, made up of child recruiters, middlemen and placement agencies in the cities.
Charts on the walls showed how nearby villages had been stripped of children. In Sankda, with 150 families, 70 children had been sent away to work; in Ajgara, home to 300 families, 105 children had left.
The recruiters who comb the villages, they said, are usually women whose extensive personal contacts in the region help them identify vulnerable targets: families with six or more children, single mothers, recently widowed fathers, the permanently unemployed and alcoholics.
They list the advantages of sending a girl into service: the child, they promise, will send back monthly earnings, do a bit of light housework and learn city ways, which will enhance her marriage prospects.
Often the recruiters are met with gratitude, children’s advocates say. Despite reports of abuse of children by employers and the failure of agents to send back the children’s wages, parents remain susceptible to the agents’ main argument that sending the child away to work will guarantee him or her a better life than staying in the village.
Karuna Mondal, a Rajbati resident who sent her teenage daughter, Soma, to Calcutta to work in a lawyer’s house, said it had not been a difficult decision. “I thought it would be a good opportunity for her,” she said. “She had dropped out of school. What was there for her to do here?” she asked, looking around at the family home, a bare, thatched shack without running water or electricity.
In the end, her daughter returned home with the help of a local charity, because the girl said she had been badly treated.
Even if a child does not send money, the family can be better off, said Asha Iyer of Save the Children. “It’s one less mouth to feed,” she said.
The recruiter also stands to profit, earning 3,000 to 10,000 rupees, about $65 to $225, per child, as well as a percentage of the child’s wages.
“The rate varies depending on the quality of the child,” Mr. Ray, of Save the Children, said. “Is she good looking? Does she have some basic education? Can she communicate well? They are treated as commodities. The really nice-looking girls get diverted into prostitution, which means a higher fee for the agent.”
Hemlata Mondal, a homemaker who lives near Rajbati and who used to scour villages for candidates, said she got into the business when she realized how lucrative it could be.
“No one has shunned me for the work I did,” she said. “I felt I was doing something good for the families.”
She stopped work last year after the police, under pressure from the activists, threatened her with arrest.
So far, the government’s focus has been on the employers rather than the suppliers.
“This is typically a middle-class issue,” said Sudha Pillai, a senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Labor and Employment. “It is important to reach out to the newspaper-reading middle classes to make sure that they know that this is not innocuous.”
“A lot of euphemisms are used,” she said in an interview, adding that girls were sometimes called “playmates” for babies or household helpers. “We have to repeat the message that this is a crime,” she said.
Mohammad Ashraf Ali of Right Track, a charity based in Calcutta that combats children’s domestic work, said the government was not doing enough to get that message out. He said many employers were still unaware of the law or believed that it did not apply to them.
“Most argue that they are doing something noble by helping feed and clothe poor village children,” he said. “But the maids are usually badly dressed and hungry.”
Jasmina, the 8-year-old maid, knows nothing of the legislation that has made her job illegal and sees little prospect of respite from her drudgery. Interviewed on a rare free afternoon, granted by her employers under pressure from Right Track, she said she dreamed of another life. “I’d like to be at school,” she said with a crooked smile, swinging her spindly legs. “I want to be a teacher.”