Opinion Even 50 years after abolition, bonded labour casts its shadow on India’s democratic promises

Over half a century earlier, in 1974, another film, Ankur, Shyam Benegal’s directorial debut, reflected on labour exploitation and poverty. After a few months, the Emergency was declared, and the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, broadcast her Twenty-Point Programme. Its fourth point was the “Abolition of bonded labour”. She declared, “The practice of the bonded labour system is barbarous and will be abolished. All contracts and other arrangements under which services rendered by such bonded labourers are secured will be declared illegal.”

It carried the spirit of already prevalent Constitutional provisions. For example, Article 23(1) says, “Traffic in human beings and begar and other similar forms of forced labour are prohibited, and any contravention of this provision shall be an offence punishable in accordance with the law”. But until the Emergency, no national law existed to prosecute the offence of forced labour. It was only 50 years ago, on January 28, 1976, that the Lok Sabha passed The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act. Subsequently, it was passed by the Rajya Sabha and, with the assent of the President, became a law on February 9.

Bonded labour (or debt bondage) is defined as a condition where money is lent in such a way that the debtor is forced to pay back through labour instead of money. Today, victims are found in establishments that supply modern Indian cities with bricks, sugar, silk, ginger, coffee and other items that need harvesting or processing by unskilled labourers. Even government contractors, through multiple layers of subcontracting, have been found to use bonded construction labourers at government worksites.

Migrant workers displaced far from their homes are easily kept in bondage at such locations. In some rural settings, begar in Article 23 (often mistyped ‘beggar’) is a “traditional” system for demanding labour from the poor for free, even without a loan. The practice still exists, for example, as bitti chakri in Karnataka.

Even in the very few cases of violations that get reported, caste and other predilections of government officials, or even the judiciary, may delay or defeat the good intentions of the 1976 Act. A month before his retirement in 2022, Supreme Court Justice Hemant Gupta characterised appeals under the Act as a misuse of the law by a racket.

Failure to serve the deprived is endemic not only to judicial systems but also to technological systems designed by the privileged. Aadhar was to exclude the racket of fraudulent claimants for government benefits such as rations or MGNREGA. Unfortunately, even eligible workers sometimes experience exclusion at wage payment time if toil-worn fingerprints do not work on biometric readers. There is no onus on the system to ensure the inclusion of eligible beneficiaries. The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls are designed to exclude suspected fraud, not to include all the eligible. Likewise, there is no systemic mechanism to ensure that labourers receive minimum wages in their bank accounts.

The new labour codes, passed in 2020 and brought into effect in 2025, replace labour inspectors with labour facilitators. In practice, however, this facilitation largely serves employers rather than workers. Criminal punishment for putting workers in debt bondage is an important deterrent. However, all labour exploitation has one core feature: Non-payment of a living wage. Thus, systems that ensure payment could reduce the occurrence of the crime in the first place. Such prevention is increasingly feasible in a technology-surveilled modern state. For instance, blockchain-based systems could ensure that government payments to contractors record the full chain of disbursements down to the last worker in a subcontracting hierarchy. Perhaps, resolving the payment issue would pave the way for a better future – free of bonded labour.

The writer works in the anti-trafficking sector