Just as the nefarious act itself, exploitation has wide-ranging meanings. It could be defined as an act of using something in an unjust or cruel manner. In is also used to mean mistreating and abusing a person or a group of persons unfairly merely as nothing more than an object. It also mean taking something that does not legally belong to the exploiter; doing trade/business/dealing related transactions by fraud and cheating; profiteering; hording; forced labour or under-paid work; treating people according to their social status and not as human being, etc., etc. Exploitation is also known to hide its utterly ugly face behind laws, legalities, policies, diktats, notifications and orders. Remember that slavery was sanctified by law in the USA for centuries before it was finally abolished in its form 1960s by giving right of vote to the Blacks.

With less than one per cent of world's rich owning 80 percent of its wealth, exploitation is not only alive but is also roaring across the world, particularly the aptly named third world part of the world we live in. State backed, and supported, exploitation of all varieties still exists in almost all parts of the world even today.

Like all uncivilized countries and states elsewhere fear is also the most preferred tool of our rulers to govern. They want the people to be afraid of their power and they demand respect despite the fact that respect is never demanded but should be earned. This love of instilling fear on part of the rulers no matter how corrupt, lazy, luxury loving, ruthlessly cruel and power intoxicated they may be takes many forms and shapes.
Unscrupulous rulers anywhere find it convenient to keep their peoples illiterate, uneducated, hungry, unhealthy and unconfident by choice and by design-systematically. This is so because they fear, and rightly so, that an educated, healthy, comparatively affluent and confident people would never accept their authority and rule and would never submit to their whims and wishes to plundering the wealth of the state so openly and flagrantly for the benefit of ruling elites.

Keeping the people hungry, uneducated, unhealthy, frightened and unconfident systematically is the extension of the most preferred toll of unscrupulous rulers anywhere across the world- fear. All these types of fear are meant to achieve objectives that in turn help ensure continuation of their rule. An illiterate population suits the unscrupulous leaders under discussion simply because a people unaware of their legal rights can not effectively challenge the rulers- no matter how unscrupulous, cruel, immoral they may be- legally, morally, socially or culturally. It also suits the rulers for any reason- an abundant supply of cheap labour- be it un-skilled, semi-skilled, skilled labourers and even professionals who are ready to work for unacceptably low wages for want of work. By extension, this also provides seemingly justified, but actually immorally flawed, pretext for the rulers to exploit the toil and labour of their own masses for a pittance of real wages by ensuring depressed wages.

Totally illiterate and barely educated populace also suits the rulers because it pose no threat to their rule, and its extension over and over again even if in opposition as members belonging to treasury as well as opposition benches in the third world countries anywhere belong to just one class- call it elite, oligarchy, aristocracy or anything else as you like. That explains that why in nations such as ours anywhere in the world have two distinctly different systems of education, one for the ruling rich and another for their poor subjects. Despite the various shades in both these two systems of education it is ensured that a son, grand son and great grand son of a labourer would remain and labourer no matter how intelligent he may be while a son, grand son and great grand son of a person belonging to ruling elite class would remain as influential, rich and pampered as his elite father, or mother or both, no matter how dumb he may be. A confident populace is also unacceptable to the rulers under discussion simply because a confused and threatened people are easy to be governed.

Governments in all civilized societies can not afford to remain indifferent to public opinion. They also can not take the risk of neglecting the popular sentiment because they are scared of the educated masses who know their rights and who also fulfils their duties and obligations to the state. They are forced to take the public opinion seriously unlike rulers of the Third World who hate dissent, difference of opinion, freedom of expression, speech and thought. In short, civilized societies are called civilized because their founding forefathers and successive rulers have taken great pains to guarantee inviolable and sacred legal rights to their people and also because their laws guarantee freedoms associated to all facets of social, political, financial, human rights.

However, in societies where "rule of gun or man" is the law, fear is a tool that rulers love the most because it helps rulers achieve, retain and prolong their despotic reign and power indefinitely if possible. The systematic use of fear starts with sowing the seeds of disunity, strife, discord and disharmony across the social, cultural, religious, ethnic, sectarian, lingual, tribal strata of the society. This helps rulers achieve many useful objectives including masses looking to rulers for protection thereby according them somewhat credibility, no matter even it fake, that they need badly to present a democratic face to the world.The strife also allows the leaders to acquire arbitrary powers that help them ply one group against the other and also to punish those not in their personal good book. Discord, thus, serves unscrupulous rulers anywhere extremely well because it divides people on the one hand and punish enemies, political or otherwise, on the other to rule as they like.

Like all other write-ups I refrain from citing specific examples here not because there is any dearth of them but simply because I feel it a waste of time when tens of millions of victims of the system all around me understand the specifics better than me.