India's Forgotten Children

India's Forgotten Children exposes widespread trafficking, persecution and oppression among the children and young people of India's 250 million strong Dalit community. India's caste system has its roots in ancient history. Yet its impact today on India's Untouchables, (as they were formerly known), exerts an unbreakable grip of exploitation, poverty, and sheer misery. For Dalit children, trafficking is a threefold burden. It means being sold into bonded labour; the so called harvesting of human organs for transplants, a ruthless surgical theft, often with devastating consequences; and the sex trade, where millions of young girls, and increasingly boys, are dragged against their will into a life of the worst kind of sexual exploitation and despair. To be trafficked as a child is not only devastating, like a flood the damage inevitably tears into adult life, with long term implications for continuing vulnerability, exploitation and abuse.

Meticulously researched, this documentary portrays the everyday lives of these forgotten children of India, whose painful predicament rarely reaches the headlines. It shows how their own government appears to turn a blind eye to the extent of their suffering and how in the West Dalit children and their plight are largely unacknowledged. But in their villages and towns when traffickers are at work these children can simply disappear into a latter day slave trade, about which the International Community remains largely silent.

Filmed in village communities around the centres of Bengaluru, Lucknow and Hyderabad, and with the help of Dalit children interviewed in their daily life situations, the charting of these disturbing stories is vividly portrayed. With expert analysis from Indian commentators and human rights advocates, the film also reveals how a small but steady light of hope is emerging. Though the Dalits have not been educated for centuries, their longed for provision of English medium education as a key to their liberation is just emerging. It is a small beginning, but the portrayal of this transformation implies hope for their future.

Видео India's Forgotten Children канала Michael Lawson