WASHINGTON: India has “some of the best legislation in the world” but the laws are not implemented adequately, Max Kem of the International Labor Office (ILO) said recently.
Though the implementing au thonities, he said, were “rehabilitating freed bonded laborers, but “implementation is far from sat is factory in many, many states of the union both as regards punishment of offenders, who usually go unpunished and practically never go to prison and also as regards rehabilitation.”
He gave India credit for acknowledging that there is a problem to be solved. By contrast, he Said, Pakistan denied the existence of the problem right up to 1989, though the problem in Pakistan “is at least as big as in India.”
The ILO official figured that India’s problems stemmed from corruption, vested interests at the focal level, and the legacy of social customs.
Sixty one percent of banded labor in India came from the scheduled castes and 25% from the scheduled tribes, “So it is also mixed up with the problem of untouchables,” he added.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 2, 1993
