Statsguru: Modern slavery estimates up 38% for India, shows data

The 2023 Global Slavery Index puts India at the top with the highest number of people estimated to be living in 

modern slavery.
 

Weaker social protection could be part of the reason, suggests an analysis of data put out in the report. The report is the latest endeavour by the Geneva-based International Labour Organization, International Organization for Migration, and human rights group Walk Free to track modern slavery. It defines modern slavery to include forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage and similar practices. The number of affected people in India is up by more than a third since the last report (chart 1).
 

A look at India relative to its neighbourhood shows a higher prevalence of modern slavery adjusted for population than in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China and Nepal. A vulnerability score that shows the extent to which a population might fall prey to slavery-like conditions is higher than each of them barring Bangladesh (charts 2, 3).
 

India does have better social protection than most of its neighbours. However, less than a fifth of its vulnerable population is covered (chart 4). The pessimism over modern slavery is borne out by other data sets as well. A recent Parliament reply noted that around 10,000 people needed to be rescued from bonded labour between 2015-16 and 2022-23. The last census noted that many children were part of the working population. Some states had more than a tenth of their children in the labour force (chart 5).

The report mentions caste as a factor in modern slavery. Migrant women and those from lower castes are often trapped in marriage schemes, which entail forced labour. The report also highlighted the risk of importing the products of modern-day slavery. India’s import of at-risk products rose 135 per cent since the 2018 report. This is the highest increase for major countries barring China (chart 6).

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