Over 14 million adults and children are trapped in modern slavery in India, a report has revealed, the most of any country in the world

The 2014 Global Slavery Index collected data on 167 countries, each of which was cited as having some percentage of slavery affecting its population. In total, a staggering 35.8 million people are reportedly enslaved worldwide. The three countries with the highest levels of slavery when population is taken into account were Mauritania with 4%, just under 4% in Uzbekistan, and Haiti’s 2.3%. Qatar, currently set to host the World Cup in 2022, was fourth with 1.4% of its population considered as living in slavery. In sheer numbers, India’s 14.3 million reveals the prevalence of slavery in the country, making up nearly 40% of the number of people in slavery worldwide. The next highest modern slave populations were found in China with 3.2 million and Pakistan with 2.1 million. Europe was not omitted from the report, with the highest percentages of modern slavery being found in Moldova and Russia. Moldova was 15th when countries were ranking by percentage with 0.9%, while Russia reached 0.7%, translating to roughly one million people enslaved in the country. Published by Walk Free Foundation, a “global human rights organisation dedicated to ending modern slavery”, the 2014 Global Slavery Index defines enslaved and slavery by including the presence of human trafficking, debt bondage, forced labor, forced or servile marriage and commercial sexual exploitation. This is the second annual report produced by the foundation and has seen numbers increase by 20% on 2013. However, rather than an increase in the total number of enslaved people, the foundation puts the increase down to the amount of data that is becoming available for researchers, saying that the full extent of the problem is only now becoming apparent.