Lured by the promise of money and training, they end up as domestic workers who endure abuse and beatings at the hands of their masters.

She went to Delhi dreaming of a new start, of escape from a life of poverty and hardship. Yet when she arrived, Sushma Kumari quickly realised she had been tricked. Far from being trained in the skills of acupuncture, for two years she was forced to work as an unpaid domestic help in the home of the “doctor” who was supposed to be teaching her. She toiled from five in the morning till midnight, seven days a week. She was abused and mistreated. Almost certainly she was brought to Delhi by a professional trafficker who, beyond doubt, knew she would live the life of a slave.

For a woman who has the right to burn with anger, Sushma talks in little more than a whisper. “I really wanted to go home but I was not allowed to talk to my father,” she says. “I felt desperate, cheated.”
Her story is a journey to the dark side of the new India, away from the tales of soaring economic growth and gleaming fashion malls, of Western-style coffee-shops filled with a newly wealthy class. The two are surely connected; chief among the reasons for the growing demand for young, poor women from places like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and other desperately poor states to come to toil in India’s growing metropolitan centres, is that a new generation of professional women entering the workforce no longer have the time or inclination for household chores. Human traffickers fill the gap.
And in a way, Sushma had been drawn by the promises of the New India. After she was forced to leave school early because the family were so poor, her father learnt, through an acquaintance, of an acupuncturist in Delhi looking for a trainee. A middle-man arranged that Sushma could be that person.
When we left the village, we were taken to another village for a month and then brought to Delhi. In the first weeks there was some informal training but it became obvious we were there to work as domestic servants,” she recalls. “After that, we just had to work. When my father called I was told to say everything was fine and that I was doing well.”

The reality was quite different. Beaten and abused, accused of stealing and worked to the bone, Sushma wanted to escape but did not know how. She suffered for two years before learning, through another domestic worker, of an organisation that could help. Then she ran away.

The treatment of India’s domestic workers is a topic the establishment rarely addresses. Relied upon to cook, clean, shop, wash and iron clothes and even nanny children, they become indispensable for many families. Yet while some employers treat them well, many are remarkably cruel. Stories of abuse abound. Last month, a badly beaten 13-year-old girl was rescued from the home of a professional couple in Gurgaon, Delhi’s hi-tech satellite city. The couple told the police that they beat the child to get rid of their stress.

The charity Sushma ran to for help is called Nirmana. Established 12 years ago, the group uses trained overseas volunteers from a partner organisation, Voluntary Services Overseas. One of the volunteers working with Nirmana is 25-year-old Serena O’Sullivan. She worked for a FTSE 100 company for a year after leaving university but decided she wanted to do something more fulfilling. After working for several charities, she became convinced that governments in poor countries needed to be pressed to include the poorest people in their programmes. “It led me to accept a VSO placement in India with Nirmana. I am able to share my skills in communications and advocacy, but also spend time with rescued workers and help to get their voices heard at a national and international level.

“It is very hard to reconcile your own life and those of the people here. You hear the worst stories you can imagine. You wonder how one person can treat another person like that,” she says. “It is as if some people here think that others are not deserving of the same rights.”

The scale of the problem Nirmana is trying to deal with is vast. A full 40 per cent of the people involved in domestic work are below the age of 14. And the number of people being trafficked is growing. The agencies which place them are unregulated and unsupervised. But slowly the country is being forced for the first time to consider the problem. The work of Nirmana and VSO is one factor. Another has been the publication of Aravind Adiga’s novel, White Tiger, which won this year’s Booker Prize with its account of the abuse and mistreatment of servants. Some abused servants are summoning the courage to speak out.

One such is 17-year-old Meena Tirki. Meena says she is 17 but she could be younger. Though she tries to smile as she tells her story, her face is impossibly sad. And with good reason. The eldest of four girls from a village near Siliguri, Meena’s family could never afford to send her to school. Earlier this year, an agent went to her village looking for girls who wanted to work in Delhi.

Under pressure from her stepmother, Meena agreed. Placed with a family in east Delhi, Meena found herself sleeping on the roof during the blistering summer, rising at 5 am to begin a day of exhausting labour. The family said they would not pay her and the abuse began almost immediately. “The husband would hit me. He would accuse me of not working,” she says. But Meena heard about Nirmana and she also ran.

With the help of Nirmana, Meena and Sushma have since been placed with other families in Delhi where they are working as domestic helpers. It would be a lie to say their stories have a saccharine-sweet ending. While they are now being paid, they receive only a pittance and they still work gruelling hours. But there is the vaguest flicker of hope. Sushma has been attending an open school in Delhi and hopes to complete her exams come April. She says, “Then I will decide whether to go home or not.” She has begun to take control of her life.

The lot of the poor in Bangladesh is no different. If you could see their faces, you would weep. If you could see how young and frightened they look as they recount in whispers what happened to them, you would be horrified. And yet you would also be amazed by their bravery. Amazed that these two teenage girls — both disabled and both having been raped by people they knew – can muster the courage to speak out. They have chosen not to be silent.

Diljahan is 16 and has a learning disability. Her mother and father are dead and she lives in a village near the northern Bangladeshi town of Rangpur with her grandfather, a wiry, good-natured man. Four years ago she was sexually assaulted by an uncle when her grandfather had gone to the market and she was left alone in the house.

“I asked him, ‘Why are you doing this, uncle?’” says Diljahan. “He told me that if I told anyone about what had happened he would kill me. Five times he assaulted me in the house. I did not tell anyone because I was too scared.”

Several months later, a female relative discovered the child was pregnant and demanded an explanation. The grandfather and other family members confronted the uncle, who fled from the authorities. Meanwhile, 13 weeks into her pregnancy, Diljahan miscarried.

Of all the marginalised and oppressed groups in Bangladesh, few are more vulnerable than disabled people. A combination of discrimination and a woeful lack of organised help from the authorities means that mentally and physically disabled people have only their families to care for them. And yet the disability rights movements in Bangladesh are growing. In recent years there has been a gradual shift. Organisations have started to establish self-help groups to which disabled people can look for help. And they have started to use the law to defend the rights of the most vulnerable.

“At the moment we have 70 cases where we are providing legal aid. Most of them are rape cases,” says Shakil Ahmed Khan, a Dhaka-based law officer with Action on Disability and Development. He says disabled people are often the victims of sexual assault. “The attackers think that disabled people cannot defend themselves, that they will not testify. They think they will not disclose what happened to them and that they will not be able to afford to go to court.”

Hosna is also 16. She is bright but suffers from a physical disability that has left the right side of her body – her upper body in particular – hugely weakened. She has three sisters and two brothers and she sits with her mother as she tells how she was attacked three and a half years ago. She remembers the month, the day and the precise time when she was attacked by her 26-year-old cousin.

“I was cutting grass for a goat, using a scythe. The cousin tried to persuade me to go elsewhere to cut grass. I told him I did not want to. I said I had enough grass where I was,” she says. “He then took my scythe and threw it into the jungle and told me to go and collect it. When I went to go and get it he came up behind and forcefully raped me. I could not resist. My right side does not work. He just held me down on one side. There was a witness and he chased the man away.”

Given the cultural pressures, the sense of shame, their fear and the slow, bullock-cart pace of justice in Bangladesh, it would have perhaps been easier for the two girls to have done nothing. But with the support of their families and the backing of the National Disabled Women’s Council they decided to confront the authorities with what happened to them and demand action.

In Diljahan’s case, the uncle was arrested but released on bail. The case is pending and the uncle still lives in the same village as the teenager and she regularly sees him. Asked how that made her feel, she replies, “I want to kill him.”

For Hosna, her decision to press charges resulted in the cousin being arrested and detained for 18 months. Remarkably – but not necessarily uniquely in south Asia – some officials suggested the cousin should “make things right” by marrying the young woman. She and her mother rejected this. The cousin has also now been released on bail but the case is due to come to trial shortly. “I want justice,” says Hosna. Her mother, Nur Banu, adds that others in their village once considered them weak but now have respect for them.

The teenager says that some days she believes she has put what happened behind her. As an indication of her intention to succeed and move on with her life, Hosna’s mother tells of the painful, exhausting four-hour journey her daughter makes every day to get to school. “I thought that my daughter was not good at studies,” she says. “But the teacher at the school said to me, ‘Your daughter is brilliant. You should take care of her’.” When she says that, both mother and daughter smile.

Copyright @ The Statesman.