Word: babita
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Finding one wasn't difficult. She met Babita through a friend who had employed the child's mother. Babita's father, Parikshit, was happy to let her leave the family of eight's slum home for a few dollars and the offer of free clothes, food and board. The 10-year-old's mother, Janaki, was glad she would be going to school. "Batra said she would love my daughter like her own," says Janaki...
...Three months after Babita's departure, her 14-year-old brother, Shekhar, watched Batra pull up outside the house in an auto-rickshaw, walk Babita to a bench, sit her down and leave. "I thought Babita had come home for a visit," says Shekhar. But when he walked over, he found Babita slumped, barely conscious. The right side of her head was so swollen it hung over her ear. Her body was covered in nail scratches and bruises. Her thumb was broken. Shekhar ran to fetch his mother, and they rushed Babita to a hospital, where a doctor diagnosed...
...sobs. "People will always know I have been to jail. Now my husband will definitely ask for a divorce. Who could have thought these poor people, living in a slum, would have dared to file charges against us?" The accusations against her, of violent fits of fury directed against Babita, have ignited a controversy over the use of child servants. "This is modern slavery," says Kailash Satyarthi of the Save Childhood Movement, "It's a fallout of the expanding middle class where working couples need reliable servants." Too many of whom view children - in their powerlessness - as the no-risk...