43 bonded labourers rescued in Turbat

With the efforts of the Karachi office of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the law enforcement agencies in Balochistan have rescued 43 members of the Hindu community, including women in children, in a remote area of the Turbat district who had been kept as bonded labourers for three years.

Shankar Bheel, a Hindu community member from the Mirpurkhas district, submitted an application on October 3 at the HRCP Karachi office and complained that three people, Abdul Wahid Brohi, Ghulam Hussain Makrani and Haji Majeed Makrani, had kept 43 members of his community in detention and forcing them to work in the fields without giving them salaries and sufficient food, said Abdul Hai, an HRCP Karachi official.

“The HRCP contacted its coordinator Ghani Parwaz in Makran for help, who made efforts to resolve the issue but could not have them released,” Hai told The News.

However, the law enforcement agencies conducted a raid and rescued all of them on November 1, the HRCP representative added.

The rescued Hindu community members reached Yousaf Goth Bus Terminal in Karachi on November 2 in a bus under police security, where an HRCP Karachi team, headed by Asad Iqbal Butt, the rights body’s vice-chairperson, greeted them. Later, they were sent to their native village in Mirpurkhas.

The rescued community members, narrating their ordeal, said that they had been deprived of salaries and health facilities.

“The landlord did not allow us to move beyond a certain area,” one of the rescued people said.

Researchers working on bonded labourers consider agriculture to be a major
location for debt bondage, particularly for share croppers. The situation of sharecroppers is considered to be most abject in lower Sindh, followed by southern Punjab.

A very noticeable dimension in lower Sindh is the large numbers of non Muslim farmers, mostly as Hindu migrants from the arid areas of Tharparkar, states an International Labour Organisation’s report titled ‘Bonded Labour in Pakistan’.