The World - News from Aug. 4, 1989

More than 20 million children live in bonded slavery in South Asia, half of them in India, the Anti-Slavery Society said. “This system is perpetuated in India and also in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,” society representative Kailish Satyarthi told a U.N. Human Rights Commission working group in Geneva. After listing fields ranging from agriculture to fireworks plants in which “child bondage” is employed, he said the “tragic reality” is that governments of the region “dilute the gravity of child slavery by interpreting it as . . . simple child labor.”