Jharkhand girl's body chopped for demanding salary: Slavery is India's shame
The body of a 16-year-old girl, chopped into 12 pieces and stuffed into separate packets, was recovered from a drain in Delhi's Mianwali Nagar, on May 4. The investigation into the case has since thrown up some very disturbing facts about how slavery hides under the drawing room carpets of India's metro cities, including its national capital. It shows us how a culture of silence ensures exploitation of India's poor by denying them their most basic rights in our flashy cities.
A 15-year-old girl working as a maid in a south Delhi home was chopped into a dozen pieces & dumped in a drain a fortnight ago. Cops say people who brought her from J'khand killed her for demanding her salary. They allegedly didn't pay her a penny in 3 years. @htTweets @htdelhi pic.twitter.com/1OcuYPW57G
— Shiv Sunny (@shivsunny) May 20, 2018
The girl's killers have told the police that she was murdered because she demanded the money she had earned by working as a domestic help over three years.
A quick recap of the story of the girl, identified as Soni Kumari, would help us understand how domestic helps in this country remain the stock of neglect and victims of our collective apathy.
Soni Kumari was 13 when she went missing from her home in Jharkhand. Manjeet Singh Karketa (30), who is accused of killing her, told the police that he had brought the girl to Delhi along with his accomplices from Jharkhand. Her family had approached the local police station and lodged a missing person's complaint but to no avail. It appears she was abducted and brought to Delhi. There are numerous instances of human trafficking such as Soni's. Yet, the authorities choose to look the other way as the most vulnerable, often minors, arrive mysteriously in cities far from their homes, to work as labour in often brutal conditions. The silence of those in power, demanding to know how these people even got there, is chilling.
They found her a job as a domestic help at a salary of Rs 6,000 per month. In the three years that the girl slogged in Delhi, she wasn't paid a penny. Her employers paid the salary to Manjeet and his aides. Things worsened when Soni decided to ask the men to pay her because she wanted to return home. On May 3, Manjeet took Soni to his house in Nangloi and tried to pacify her. On seeing Soni's determination to head home with her money, Manjeet, along with Shalu (31) and Gauri (36), strangled the girl. In a bid to hide their crime, they chopped the girl's body into pieces, stuffed it in bags and threw it in a nearby drain.
The girl's body could be identified after the police joined the head with the torso. Soni, unfortunately, is not the only victim of India's regulation-less, free-for-all domestic workers' market.
Most of the domestic servants are migrants, women, many are minors, and belong to the lowest end of the economic spectrum. This makes them easy targets for exploitation.
News reports of domestic helps being abused by their employers are fairly common. Cases of torture, beatings, and sexual assault are common.
Since they belong to the unorganised sector, there are no laws safeguarding their rights — no minimum wage requirements, no health or insurance benefits, and no job security whatsoever.
India is a signatory to the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) 189th convention, known as the Convention on Domestic Workers, but has not bothered to ratify it yet. ILO estimates that there are at least four million domestic workers in India.
Post liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early 1990s, as the disposable income started rising steadily, it is estimated that there was a nearly 120 per cent rise in the number of domestic workers in the country.
Since the domestic helps come from the most marginalised sections of the society — the Dalits, the Adivasis, the OBCs, the women — they have never been able to organise themselves as one voice.
There is absolutely no regulation in Delhi on placement agencies that help domestic helps find work or aid the prospective employers in reaching out to helps. Even as agencies continue to flout the most basic hiring norms like not recruiting minors for such work, the bill to regulate such agencies is still at the discussion stage.
This invariably means that helps denied promised wages or exploited have little or no legal recourse. While cases where helps have been subjected to extreme brutality do find mention in newspapers and TV channels, numerous others are denied even the salary they are entitled to, which is, one must not forget, way below standards in the absence of a specific law.
It is baffling that more than 70 years after Independence, a girl can be brought to Delhi from some remote corner of the country and forced to work in a house without any registration, without the police knowing, without anybody caring. She can be made to work for years without being paid a penny under some strange agreement between her employers and some criminals.
She can then be killed because she wants to be paid for the work she did. This is slavery — alive and thriving — in India's national capital in the 21st century.