India faces many problems with human trafficking, child exploitation, and forced labor. Human trafficking is when people are recruited, bought, or kidnapped to serve an exploitative purpose such as sexual slavery, forced labor, or child soldiery. This is pretty much like a modern- day slavery. Men, women, and children are held in bondage and face forced labor working in brick kilns, rice mills, agriculture and embroidery factors. More than 1.2 million children in India are caught up in the human trafficking as child prostitutes.
At least 12.3 million people around the world are trapped in forced labor. Forced labor takes place in many different forms, including debt bondage, trafficking and other forms of modern slavery. The victims most vulnerable are women and girls, migrants in debt bondage, and farmworkers. India has emerged as a key destination and transit point for global trafficking of women and girls. Women and children and trafficked within the country for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced marriage. These women and children come from relatively poorer areas and are trafficked to richer ones. Approximately 20,000 or 20% of women in prostitution in Bombay are under 18. Every day, about 200 girls and women in India enter prostitution, 80% of them against their will.
Child labor in India is an extensive problem. Children under the age of 14 are forced to work as factory workers, domestic servants, beggars, and agriculture workers. Some have even been used as armed combatants by some terrorist groups. The government of India reports about 20 million children laborers while other non- governmental organizations estimate the real number to be close to 50 million! Children under 14 years of age, some as young as 4 or 5, are working hard just to get a meal. An estimated 14% of children in India between the ages of 5 and 14 are engaged in child labor activities, including carpet production. To end child labor it would cost $760 billion over a 20 year period. Some children are forced to work up to 18 hours a day, sometimes not even leaving the confines of the factory. Two out of every three working children are physically abused.
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