India plans a riposte to slavery report:
Context:
- India sends a refutation to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) challenging India’s ranking in a global slavery report.
- The country will now build pressure on the global body to distance itself from the Australian-based NGO-Walk Free Foundation.
Why is India against the report?
- India has raised question about why the International Labour Organization (ILO) tied up with Walk Free Foundation (WFF) to produce a report on ‘modern slavery’, a term ILO hasn’t so far defined in its own convention.
- The ILO, without following any protocol, endorsed WFF’s survey.
What is Modern Slavery?
- Modern slavery refers to situations where one person has taken away another person’s freedom.
- Their freedom to control their body, their freedom to choose to refuse certain work or to stop working so that they can be exploited.
- Freedom is taken away by threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power and deception.
What is International Labour Organization (ILO)?
- The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a United Nations agency.
- Objective: It deals with labour problems, particularly international labour standards, social protection, and work opportunities for all.
- Also, the ILO registers complaints against entities that are violating international rules.
- Member States: The ILO has 187 member states: 186 of the 193 UN member states plus the Cook Islands are members of the ILO.
What is Walk Free Foundation (WFF)?
- The Walk Free Foundation is a global organization.
- Objective: It makes an attempt to end contemporary slavery and human trafficking.
- More specifically, it is known for its Global Slavery Index.
What is Global Slavery Index?
- The Global Slavery Index presents an annual ranking of 167 countries based on the percentage of a country’s population that is estimated to be in modern slavery.
- Three key variable: It includes data on three key variables:
- Prevalence of modern slavery in each country,
- Vulnerability and
- Government responses to modern slavery.
What is India’s position in the recent Global Slavery Index?
- The 2016 Global Slavery Index estimates that 45.8 million people are subject to some form of modern slavery in the world today.
- Now, India has been ranked 4th out of 167 countries.
- The top three countries were North Korea, Uzbekistan and Cambodia.
- In 2016, it was deemed to have some 18.3 million people trapped in slavery.
- In 2017, about 1.4% of the population working under coercive conditions.
Where is India lagging behind?
- The long-term structural weakness of India’s economic reform has been the inability to expand the market for jobs in sync with its demographic growth.
- Many of these new-age slaves are women and children, the most vulnerable sections on the frontline of economic slowdown and poverty.
- Increase in number of slaves every year is due to the rank failure of India’s law enforcement institutions.