Gender, Race, And Utopias Of Development¹

In the late 1960s and early 1970s West Germany was embroiled in a number of international scandals involving the trafficking of young Asian women. The Indian public was enraged when it became known that 240 young Indian girls, many of them minors, had been forced to work for years as indentured workers in West Germany. Although these Indian women had been lured to Germany with the promise of a high-quality nursing education, they in fact spent most of their time cleaning toilets and mopping floors. Worst of all, many of them had to work in psychiatric institutions that were shunned by native German health care workers. The scandal became a national political issue in India, where the parliament asked the government to investigate the matter.3.