The Global Slavery Index 2014, announced on Monday last, presents a dismal picture for South Asia. Of the 35.8 million people enslaved worldwide, 23.5 million live in Asia. Of the Asian total, India's share is the largest with 14.2 million followed by Pakistan with 2.05 million, Bangladesh with 680,900, Nepal with 228,700, Afghanistan with 132,800 and Sri Lanka with 73,600. In terms of prevalence of slavery that is its proportion to the total population, India once again tops the list of South Asian nations with 1.141 per cent. Pakistan follows India with 1.13 per cent. Nepal comes next with 0.823 per cent of the population followed jointly by Afghanistan and Bangladesh with 0.435 per cent and Sri Lanka with 0.359 per cent.
What is so disturbing is not one country among the 167 in the world covered by the index is free from this bane of modern civilisation. While Haiti tops the global list with four (4.0) per cent of its population ensnared in slavery followed closely by Uzbekistan with 3.97 per cent, even the best record holders on this count Iceland and Luxembourg have fewer than 100 such wretched souls to spoil their broth.
What is particularly disgusting for Bangladesh is that it has registered a substantial rise in the number of people enslaved. In 2013, the number was estimated at 343,000. If the estimates are correct, it has nearly doubled in just one year. Something seems to have gone wrong somewhere. So far as this year's number of such people is concerned, the figure does not sound exaggerated. But nothing phenomenally negative has happened in the country that the number of enslaved people has doubled due to it in a single year. This is the second such attempt to identify the world's enslaved people and one would not be surprised if its first estimate went wide off the mark and its second too leaves room for questioning its authenticity.
Notwithstanding such glitches, the fact remains that measuring people's state of servitude is a daunting task. With all its weaknesses, the Global Slavery Index is still likely to be representative enough for individual countries and the entire world. The underlying theme it conveys is disgraceful for a civilisation boasting interplanetary journey on and for spacecraft. There is no reason to think that free market economy has suddenly made condition for rising slavery. There was the worst type of human bondage in the past. The important issue is that phenomenal progress in education, culture and societal commitments has not been able to eliminate slavery now existing in different illegal forms.
No country's laws approve control of people by their fellow human beings. But in reality, society everywhere has continued with vested interests for a select class to exploit backwardness, illiteracy and poverty of different communities. Many of the Asian countries have continued with the long tradition of bonded labour in which slavery is perpetuated for generations. But in extreme cases, even people free from such servitude for generations are forced to live a life of slaves in foreign lands. At least 170 Bangladeshi youths who were illegally taken to Thailand for such modern slavery with the false promise of jobs but no prior knowledge of their trial and tribulation were rescued from human traffickers in that country's jungle.       Â
It is exactly at this point, modern development paradigm exposes its incapacity to deal with such stratification of society where the gloss of high society dazzles the eyes but unbearable miseries of people at the bottom hardly prick the conscience of the fortunate. Social divisions ought to have been less oppressive and inhuman if not altogether utopian. But the concentration of wealth in a few hands is not just a trend monopolised only by the wealthy of a particular nation, it is a global phenomenon now. Where the poor are getting poorer, the rich are becoming richer.
When this happens, political freedom is sacrificed at the altar of economic inequality. Some of the super rich of today seemed to have been moved by the plight of the afflicted millions in Asia and Africa. Men like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have joined hands to make available a large portion of their wealth at the service of the distressed humanity. Their initiatives have saved lives of millions and helped uncountable others to overcome sufferings. Yet their effort is no alternative to state-sponsored programmes aimed at accomplishing collective well-being.
Even corporate social responsibility as discharged by multinational companies or big corporate houses prove inadequate if the policy framework of a state retains the exploitative method of profit-making without creating opportunities for the disadvantaged to move up the social ladder. Access to food, education and health is the prime condition for narrowing down social disparities. In today's Bangladesh, education has been so commercialised that children from poor families will have hardly any chance of proving their talent at national level. This was not the case earlier when education was not so intensively coaching-based. Students from poor families could do well in competitive examinations in order to ameliorate their social status. Now it is a difficult proposition.
Social division will widen with concentration of wealth in a few hands and a lot more people will be forced to surrender their political and social freedom under a modern-day fiefdom under construction.
nilratan halder2000@yahoo.com