Asia is home to largest number of forced Labor Globally by Rahul Kumar, OneWorld South Asia 12:46pm 13th May, 2005   New Delhi, May 12, 2005    Nearly 9.5 million people in south Asia and the Pacific are working as forced labor, which is a whopping 77 per cent of the global forced labor estimated at 12.3 million people, says a new International Labour Office (ILO) report. Of these figures India has the maximum number of people being exploited economically and working under coercion in rice-mills, domestic service, brick kilns, fields and sericulture.    In one of the most comprehensive global analysis of forced labor, the ILO report - A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour – says that forced labor has become a major global problem that is present in all regions and in all types of economies. This is a hidden phenomenon and not many national studies exist about the number of people in such conditions.    Latin America and the Caribbean have 1.32 million forced labor while the industrialized countries of Europe and the USA have 0.36 million forced labor. Middle East and North Africa have 0.26 million, the transition countries have 0.21 and sub-Saharan Africa has 0.66 million forced labor.    The report says that approximately one-fifth of all forced laborers are trafficked but in Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa the proportion of trafficked persons is less than 20 per cent of all forced labor. In the industrialized countries, transition countries and west Asia and north Africa, trafficking accounts for nearly 75 per cent of the total.    The ILO defines forced labor as: “Work or service which is extracted from any person under the menace of a penalty and which the person has not entered into of his own free will.” Explaining the concept, Senior Specialist at the ILO, Caroline O’Reilly said: “There are two things related to forced labor. A person is working not of choice but is being forced to work and secondly the person is working under the threat of a penalty. Working under slavery-like conditions is how we can define forced labor.”    Herman van der Laan, director ILO sub-regional office for South Asia said: “Globalization has contributed to the rise in forced labor, particularly because of trafficking. Private contractors and traffickers earn between $30 to 40 billion globally, of which they earn $15.5 billion in Europe and the USA while in Asia the earnings average around $9.7 billion.”    The report says that bonded labor is the main form of forced labor in south Asia, particularly in India, Pakistan and Nepal. The major reasons, in this region, for people to get trapped into forced labor is because they take a loan or a wage advance from their employer during times of emergencies like health problems or for social expenditures like births and marriages.    The ILO says that illiteracy compounds the problems as the debtors are unable to verify the records or keep track of the loan repayments. In such cases, many times the debt gets transferred from the parents to their children.    In Myanmar the ILO found that forced labor exists because of the government which uses large numbers of people from villages for cultivation, portering, sentry duty and road construction.    The ILO has identified poverty, indebtedness and limited educational and employment opportunities in rural communities as leading to irregular migration and trafficking. It says that women and children from Indonesia and the Philippines are trafficked into forced commercial sex work in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, south Korea and Taiwan.    The report adds that migrant workers from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Indonesia have died in unclear circumstances in several west Asian countries and others have been subjected to severe punishments. Similarly in Singapore and Hong Kong migrant domestic workers have been ill treated.    About India, chief technical advisor, Prevention and Elimination of Bonded Labor in south Asia, Julian Parr said: “It is difficult to give precise figures of forced Labor in India but the country has the highest numbers of forced labor in the Asia and the Pacific region. The south Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have a very high incidence of bonded labour.”    Herman van der Laan, director ILO sub-regional office for South Asia said: “The legislative framework in India is solid, but enforcement is equally important. For example, the legislation on child labor is good but we found that it was not sufficient. The government has in the last 15 years taken up special programmes related to child labour, some of which relate to the root causes of the issue, and that has made a difference.”    O’Reilly said: “The global alliance on forced labour, with political will and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) can eradicate forced labor by 2015. To achieve that many Asian countries are putting the necessary legislation into place.”
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