A dozen chained workers in India were rescued from “torture” where they were forced to dig a well for 12 hours a day without pay, a state human rights organization said Monday.
This case sheds new light on a long-banned practice of forced labor, dubbed “debt slavery” by human rights activists, which forces debtors to pay back money they borrowed when interest accumulates.
The fate of these 11 workers from Maharashtra (West) reached the ears of state police because one of them managed to escape and guided them to free his comrades on June 17, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said. .
“They were forced to work 12-hour days without pay to dig a well,” the NHRC said, adding that they were chained to prevent them from escaping, fed once a day and forced to take their to relieve themselves where they were. They worked.
Four people were arrested by police, but NHRC says the task goes beyond “a simple rescue by police with the arrest of some of the accused.”
The NHRC considers the case “a gross violation of the 1976 Abolition of Forced Labor.”
Activists, who estimate the number of forced laborers in India at around 10 million, denounce that this abolition is regularly violated without much risk of prosecution.
In this case, according to NHRC, the bosses were used to using workers and then imposing such brutal conditions on them that when they were released after three or four months, they “preferred to flee without asking for their wages to find new ones to escape torture.”