Kavitha, 18, earns a living at a clothing factory in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Like many of her colleagues, she lives in accommodation provided by the factory, where she shares a dimly lit hostel room with 16 other women.
The rooms in these hostels have little in the way of home comforts – there are no fans or air conditioning – and the women sleep on simple mats on the floor. Life revolves around work at the factory, where Kavitha stitches up to 80 T-shirts an hour, eight hours a day, six days a week, for around £60 per month.
Back at the hostel, Kavitha’s life is shut off from the world behind locked doors and the high perimeter fences of a permanently guarded compound. Apart from being shuttled to the factory and back, the women are let out roughly once a week for a few hours – but always accompanied by wardens or guards. Never alone.
