Social Evils &
Rehabilitation

The most common destroyer of household finances in India, and the one most often handled by shame. What a unit can do: confidential referral to de-addiction services, family support groups, counselling for spouses and children, debt counselling alongside treatment, and employment held open through recovery. What it must never do: name people, pressure people, or make any service conditional on sobriety.

Bonded labour is illegal and persistent. It begins with an emergency loan at an impossible rate. What a unit can do: financial literacy before the crisis, emergency micro-assistance from the fund so the moneylender is not the only option, legal aid, connection to formal credit, and rehabilitation with livelihood restoration for released bonded labourers. Identification and prosecution are government functions — the unit supports the person, not the enforcement.

Illegal since 1961 and near-universal in practice. The honest position is that a community body cannot police this and should not try. What it can do: support women facing harassment with legal aid and safe referral; make the economic arguments visible; work with families before a marriage rather than after; and never, under any circumstances, mediate a dowry-related violence case within the community.

Strongly linked to poverty, distance to school, and girls’ safety on the route. What a unit can do: know which children are not in school and why; fix the reachable causes — transport, a toilet, a safe route, fees, a lost document; offer bridge education; support the family economically so the calculation changes. Protection cases go to the statutory child protection system, immediately.

Constitutionally abolished, socially present, and most visible in who is allowed to draw water, enter which building, cook for whom, and marry whom. The Setu model’s structural answer is that no service is ever conditional on caste and no caste is ever recorded, and that the Citizens’ Jury is drawn by lot precisely so the same families cannot decide everything. Discrimination in a unit’s own services is a failure trigger that can put it under administration.

Prohibited by law, still killing people in septic tanks and sewers every year, and almost entirely done by one set of communities. What a unit can do: refuse to procure any service that involves manual entry, fund and demand mechanised equipment, ensure protective equipment where mechanisation is not yet possible, and put rehabilitation and alternative employment ahead of everything else. This is one place where a community’s purchasing decisions directly determine whether someone dies.

Units are both source and destination. What a unit can do: know who has left and with whom; maintain a register of legitimate recruiters; provide pre-departure information; support families to verify that a person arrived safely; and offer reintegration — documents, health, livelihood, schooling — on return. Investigation is police work, always.

Where a practice causes physical harm, financial extraction or the denial of medical treatment — particularly to women, children and people with mental illness — it is a matter of law and health, not of belief. The distinction this model holds to: the state and the community act on harm, never on belief. Private faith and voluntary practice are nobody’s business.

Listed here only to repeat the absolute rule that governs it everywhere on this site: it never goes to community mediation, no elder or committee may ask a survivor to reconcile or explain, and referral is to survivor-centred professional and legal services. The community’s role is to make sure the survivor knows the route exists and can reach it without anyone finding out.