NEW DELHI: A teenage girl working as a maid in India’s capital was recovering in hospital Tuesday after being rescued from a home where campaigners said she was slashed with knives and mauled by dogs.

Police have arrested her employers, a 50-year-old woman and her 85-year-old mother, who live in the upmarket Vasant Kunj area of southern New Delhi, on suspicion of illegal confinement and assault, PTI news agency reported.

The 15-year-old’s injuries have focused a spotlight again on the abuse of domestic servants in the capital where thousands of workers, often children trafficked from remote and poverty-stricken states, toil for long hours in homes with almost no legal protection.

“It is horrible and barbaric,” Kiran Walia, Delhi’s minister for women and child development, told reporters after visiting the victim in a city hospital where she is being treated for multiple injuries.