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Title: Time to jump on a soap box... Post by: MontyB on 12 March 2011, 07:48:55 Generations pay off debts through slavery
Uttar Pradesh, India - An army of workers, their faces encrusted with dust, toils beside a story-high pile of unfired bricks. They are helping build a new India that appears to be leaving them behind. From sunup to sundown they spend their time pouring wet mud into molds, lugging them to the kiln, firing them and then pulling them out. For their backbreaking work, they do not receive wages. They are working to pay off a debt. In India they are known as bonded laborers, bound to those who gave them or their forefathers an advance or a loan. Human rights advocates call them modern day slaves. Read More... (http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/08/generations-pay-off-debts-through-slavery/) India official: It's not slavery After her reports on modern-day slavery in India, CNN's Sara Sidner sat down with India's Labor Secretary Prabhat C. Chaturvedi. She showed him her first report, about generations paying off debt through slavery, to let him respond. According to Sidner, the official was not surprised. He admitted that the problem of bonded labor existed in India but bristled at the word "slavery." Below is an excerpt (and watch a longer response in the video above): Read More... (http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/10/india-official-its-not-slavery/) Title: Re: Time to jump on a soap box... Post by: MontyB on 12 March 2011, 07:54:18 I would recommend watching the series but I am amazed that in this day and age this sort of crap is allowed to exist, we bitch and threaten countries like Iran for stoning people to death, China for an appalling human rights record yet we turn a blind eye to India while it spends billions on weaponry but keeps half its population in abject poverty if not slavery.
Title: Re: Time to jump on a soap box... Post by: stoffel on 12 March 2011, 10:15:48 It is a problem that cant be solved.
Specially since India also uses the cast sytem ( dont know if its the exact word) You are born in a cast and can never get out it. Title: Re: Time to jump on a soap box... Post by: Mad_Russian on 12 March 2011, 10:29:05 The word you're looking for is caste.
Here is an explanation of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India) Good Hunting. MR Title: Re: Time to jump on a soap box... Post by: MontyB on 12 March 2011, 10:58:48 Did you watch the videos?
In my opinion that is not a "caste" system in process that is straight out exploitation of the illiterate, most of them had no idea how much they owed or how much and when the debt would be paid off and it kind of annoyed me that the government "official" really didn't care as long as you didn't call it slavery. |