Women workers from tea garden rescued from forced labour in Middle East

PRASHANT ACHARYA, EOI, SILIGURI, 16 Mar 2015 : A 42-year-old tribal woman and her 23-year-old daughter have emerged as the symbols of sufferings of hundreds of poor women working in tea gardens facing the threat of human trafficking. The mother and the daughter were luckily saved and brought back home, saved from the inhuman torture they had to endure in several houses in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait where they worked as maidservants. The mother fled from the house with the help of a Bangladeshi driver working there while her daughter was helped by a local youth to leave the house where she had been working for more than three years. The agents who had lured the two away had prepared forged Nepali passports for them with the victims being unaware of this. The mother was first handed over to the Indian embassy and later to the Nepali embassy after examination of the documents. She said, “Legal documents were prepared to send me to India via Kathmandu.” The woman returned to India via Kathmandu in 2013 while her daughter came back on February 10 of this year. After reaching home, the mother filed an FIR against the local agent and the police have arrested one person, but he was soon released on bail. “I was told by my local agent that I would work in New Delhi and earn more than Rs 20,000 per month but they took me and my daughter to Kuwait and later to Saudi Arabia without our knowledge.”

Residents of a tea garden near Bagdogra, the tribal women were given false promises of lucrative jobs in New Delhi, but the local agent, with the help of brokers from Kathmandu, New Delhi and Sri Lanka took them for forced domestic work in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

“I was forced to work from 5am to 11pm without food. The male members used to abuse me every day. They used to enter my bedroom through the window and harass me,” the mother told EOI on condition of anonymity and with tears in her eyes.

Darjeeling Legal Aid Forum secretary Amit Sarkar said they are supporting the tribal women so that they get justice. The Forum is also organising awareness programmes in the tea garden belts and villages. “The police had arrested an agent but he got bail without proper investigations and without arresting the kingpin. He is roaming freely now,” Sarkar said.

According to information, among the 500,000-odd foreign workers in Kuwait, about 100,000 are domestic servants, mainly from India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Mostly men and women from poor villages and tea gardens are trafficked for forced labour.