It seems to me that what is required here is a deep change of Indian society. Women seem to compete for men with money, which is absurd. Moreover, there is this "caste" thing which, frankly, sounds like feudalism from 1000 years ago.
In most of the western world, adolescent males compete for women with their charm, looks, etc... and also the other way around. Flirting is cool. No caste system.
How do you change an ancient country's attitude towards women? I don't think you can.
Traditions can be much more powerful than laws.
Capitalism, in India, is simply one more tool used by the higher castes in order to give strength to some deeply rooted traditions which are totally disconnected from the 21st century Planet Earth.
I'm not advocating cultural relativism; the reality described in this article sounds really shitty, but it is usually instructive to go deeper and ask why things are this way among poor people in India. With sexual attraction being one of the most powerful drives and varying socioeconomic conditions in the world, it stands to reason that different places will have wildly differing customs. These change over generations, as the conditions that formed them change. For instance, an undersupply of men in the wake of a deadly war could be one force which vastly increases the sexual market value of men, and causes customs like the ones described in this article.
Look at China if you want to see a third way this can play out, where the roles are reversed.
The problem here is more a lack of strong mechanisms to set and enforce standards along with a host of deeply rooted cultural norms (especially the dowry system) that are easily exploited.
Churchill and the likes are not exactly neutral observers with no interest in preserving the status quo by any means possible, starting with intellectual dishonesty.
A better argument is that free trade based on voluntary transactions is the only just and moral system of allocating resources, in theory and in practice.
Churchill was distinctly batshit as well so you can't really actually cite him as a single reliable source.
That's simply balderdash. Churchill was not only a brilliant politician, but an extremely witty and accomplished writer, thinker, and artist. He even received the Nobel prize ... for literature[1].
If you'd like to explain why you think he is "batshit" I'd love to hear it.
About your second line, I think that the biggest problem about capitalism and developing/underdeveloped countries is that capitalism doesn't break the existing power structures, and, worse, it may reinforce them. There, capitalism is (even) less of a sea of oportunities and more of a new source of oppression mechanisms. The vicious circle associated with poverty isn't any good for people from the lower strata.
Yes, it is true that India has a culture of corruption and bribery. I wonder if part of these girls' wages are taken for the housing or "company store" type things. There were some stories recently about workers in Dubai who are just lied to about the level of pay and then held hostage with visa or passport paperwork. If it is that type of case here, then it is fraud and the exploitation is due to the faulty legal system, lack of enforcement, culture of misogyny, etc.
I don't agree at all with the idea that wage labor by itself is exploitative. Basically the error with Marxist exploitation theory is that it ignores the concept of time preference. Wage laborers with a higher time preference prefer present goods in the form of wages to the process of saving and deferring some of the present enjoyment and then taking up their own entrepreneurial venture. Of course, the state by erecting barriers to entry and other distortions exacerbate the problem.