Murder reveals plight of India's child servants

No one is certain how the boy died. First reports said that his employer cut his throat for refusing to cook. The next day, the Indian police shifted the blame to the employer's drug-addicted 21-year-old son. They said he confessed to stabbing the boy with a kitchen knife because the lad tried to stop him sniffing typewriter fluid.

What is clear, though, is that the boy was a servant called Umesh, who worked in a trader's house in Delhi. And he was 11 years old. The lurid details of Umesh's murder this week mildly interested the city's newspapers for a couple of days. But the fact that he was a child did not.

There was no hand-wringing over why a boy had been put to work in domestic service at an age when he should have had a long school career ahead of him. Nor were there any deafening demands for tighter enforcement of national or international child labour laws.

Indians have long lived with such horror stories and with the wearying reality that many of its social problems flowing from poverty and over-population are too massive for government to resolve. But Umesh's death provided an insight into an upstairs-downstairs world that faded away in Britain early in the last century, yet is preserved in India by an unending supply of extremely cheap labour, rigidly hierarchical social attitudes and profound poverty.

It is a world in which human sweat and tears have yet to be replaced by labour-saving electrical appliances or supermarket convenience foods. Of the estimated 15 million people working in domestic service in India, about one in six are thought to be below the age of 15. They are often from poor rural families; in some cases they are bonded by their parents to an employer to work as a servant in order to pay off a debt.

A wealthy Indian family in a metropolitan area will routinely employ half a dozen servants. So will expatriates. Anyone who takes a morning stroll through Chanakya Puri in the heart of the New Delhi created by Sir Edwin Lutyens in the dying days of the Raj cannot help noticing the multi-layered army of domestic staff – bearers, chowkidars (watchmen), malis (gardeners) indoor sweepers, outdoor sweepers, ayahs (nannies), cooks, drivers and dhobis (washermen), earning between £20 and £120 a month, according to their duties. In some of these jobs a 12-hour day and a six-day week are common.

In Delhi, a handbook for new expatriate arrivals contains a section defining the role of each servant. A bearer, for example, "washes dishes, does the dusting and vacuuming, makes beds, cleans floors and bathrooms, answers the door and phone, runs errands, sets and waits at table, polishes silver, serves drinks, and feeds pets". The book lists "disrespect" as grounds for instant dismissal, along with theft, fighting, disobedience and drunkenness. "Dismiss promptly," it advises. "Tell the servant to pack up, check what is being taken, inspect the quarters and escort off the premises."

But Indians in urban areas, even those in low-income white-collar jobs, also have servants, whom they often pay at lower rates. The equivalent of £6 a month will pay for someone to clean and sweep for a few hours a day.

"I have had someone to pick up after me since I was tiny," said one 31-year-old, who works in a media company. "It is absolutely normal here, even for people on fairly low incomes." And, he added, the servants are often under-age. By going out to work at 11 – fatally as it turned out – Umesh was only doing the same as many others, none of whom had any more protection than he.