In 1996, when the Labour File team visited Chirala, the handloom weaving area of Andhra Pradesh, we encountered the different ways that weavers were being exploited. The shed workers and their families, in particular, were not only denied a just wage or minimum basic facilities for living, but were also bonded, to the master weavers.

In 2006, when Labour File, heard about Azad Nagar in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, a colony where 24 bonded labourers were rehabilitated, we were forced to rethink the entire administrative policy on the issues of release and rehabilitation. Earlier, in 2000, with the concerted efforts of the NGO Bandhua Mukti Morcha (NGO) and other concerned people, the then District Collector of Vidisha, Veera Rana and her officers released around 72 bonded labourers from a stone quarry. The released were taken to the police station and the very next day to the land revenue office. Many among the released went back to their own villages, whereas 24 of them were given 150 sq ft (10 x 15 ft) of land in their name in Azad Nagar. These workers were also given tin sheets to construct temporary houses. The released were also given Rs 20,000 as compensation, of which a majority used the amount to construct house-like structures in the land allotted to them. 

Are the rehabilitated workers happy with the current situation? Their current nature of work, the houses in which they stay, their social strata, the access to schools and medical facilities, etc., forces one to reflect on the entire system of release and rehabilitation. According to the Annual Report of the Ministry of Labour 2005-2006, the number of identified bonded labourers on 30 November 2005 is 2,86,549, of which 2,66,587 have been rehabilitated. Knowing the status of the 24 released bonded labourers in Azad Nagar, the conditions of these released workers will be worth exploring.

Bonded labour or debt bondage is the worst form of exploitative employer-employee relations that exist. The workers are trapped into forced labour using the bait — the debt bondage. According to various research studies, bonded labour prevails mainly in agriculture, rice-mills, domestic service, brick kilns, stone quarries and sericulture. Currently, the trends are changing, with new forms of bondage coming into existence. The Sumangali System which prevails in the textile mills of Tamil Nadu is such an emerging form of bondage. The cover story in this issue of Labour File attempts to understand this new form where young adolescent girls are trapped into bondage with the lure of some bulk money given under marriage assistance scheme. Signing a contract for three years, and a 6-month training, the girls complete three-and-a-half years of exploitation with out even getting the basic minimum wage. As the trade unionists in Tiruppur and Coimbatore rightly put it, these golden-caged parrots or the ‘camp coolies’ unknowingly contribute to the drastic changes in the economic and social scenario of Coimbatore. This poorly paid, non-unionised, voiceless female workforce is now becoming the root cause for the employers removing the permanent employees from the mills of Tamil Nadu. On the one hand, the membership of trade unions is steadily decreasing and the local youngsters, for want of alternative employment, resort to crime, the rate of which is steadily increasing.. On the other hand, are the increasing number of girls, who, under the aegis of the Sumangali System, are getting entangled in the vise of bondedness.

“The bonded labour system stands abolished throughout the country with effect from 25 October, 1975 with the enactment of Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, says the Annual Report of the Ministry of Labour for the past 30 years” points out Abhay Xaxa in ‘Mission: Bonded Labour Abolishment…..’ Reflecting on the various forms of bonded labour, he emphasises that bondedness is a dynamic and complex problem which has to be approached in a systematic way to eradicate it completely from our society.

Over the last two decades, the traditional forms of agrarian labour employment have declined; new forms of bondage have emerged in the modern agricultural as well as other sectors of the informal economy, states Geeta Menon in ‘Changing Agrarian Relations – Labour Bondage in Karnataka’. Migrant labourers thrown out of the changing agricultural economy are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. She emphasises that the landlord-serf relationship has now become a slave wage labour-contractor relationship.

The emergence of some new global institutions, the increasing integration of agriculture in the global market and a weakening of the states in the Third World have generated a fresh set of challenges for the agrarian economies of the Third World, articulates Surinder Singh Jodhka in ‘Unfree Labour and Post-Modern Myths’. According to him, the development of capitalism in the Third World agriculture had not led to the disappearance of ‘unfree’ labour; in certain instances, it had, in fact, introduced and/or strengthened such relations.

In the cash-rich Punjab, where the economy stands on a substructure of bonded labour, the siri, sanjhi and sepi do not have any hope of overcoming their perpetual state of debt bondage. The labourers do not have any understanding of how the debt works. All they know is that they cannot leave their employment reflects Manjit Singh in ‘Punjab’s Dalits Resist Bondage in Agriculture’.

Suneet Chopra, in his article ‘Fighting Bonded Labour: The UP Experience’, emphasises that bondage is very much a part and parcel of the semi-feudal rural value structure. Not only do struggles have to be launched on a purely economic basis but also, during these struggles, the issue of bondage must be inculcated in the minds of the concerned labourers.

The government’s intention is only to maximise its own profits even if it is earned by denying labourers their basic rights and keeping them under state-sponsored bondage, says Abhay Xaxa in his article, ‘Golden Leaves, Bonded Hands’ reflecting on how the forest department forcefully tries to enslave the kendu leaf pluckers of Orissa.

From this issue of Labour File, we begin a new column ’Analysis’, which will carry research-based, in-depth analytical and informative articles. In this issue’s Analysis,  ‘Understanding the Conceptual and Administrative Boundaries of Bonded Labour System Abolition Act (BLSAA), 1976’, J John looks briefly at the context of the political economy in which the BLSAA was promulgated in India in 1976, how it set the boundaries of the concept, a brief examination of the origins of the concept, and the relevance of the Act in addressing the contemporary forms of bonded labour in India

Forced labour violates the fundamental rights guaranteed to the citizens by the Indian Constitution. India was the first country to acknowledge the problem of bonded labour, by enacting the BLSAA. However, for the bonded labourers in the country, no law, Act or action taken seems to have made a perceivable impact. Will the concerted efforts of the Indian government, the NHRC, the NGOs and the likeminded groups’ succeed in ever making bonded labour a historical fact at any time in the future?