PALAMALU, India: Slavery is alive and well and living in India under the name of bonded labour.
The country which champions the cause of the oppressed throughout the Third World has some five million slaves, according to activists working for their liberation.
Palamau, a dirt-poor district in northern Bihar state has the highest concentration of bonded laborers in the country.
The laborers, usually untouchables, Harijans and tribes are on the bottom rung of India’s caste ridden social ladder.
They are owned almost body and soul by masters who put them to work without cash wages in fields and factories, sometimes in dangerous and degrading conditions
Bonded labour was outlawed in 1976.
The law is seldom enforced because the government represents the ruling elite which benefits from cheap labour, Swami Agnivesh, president of the Bonded Labour Liberation Front told Reuters,
We still have more than 100,000 bonded laborers in this district despite our efforts to identify them and get the government to enforce the law and free them, he said.
But the politicians, the land owners and the administration are all collaborators in this game of exploitation.
Cheap it certainly is, Ganauri Bhuniyan, a Harijan, signed himself into bondage for 35 years after borrowing 35 rupees (now less than three hundred dollars) from his landlord Jwala Pandey.
We worked all day in the fields. We got only handful of grain, said Ganauri, since freed by the Front.
The typical laborer is landless, poor, and illiterate, He often needs money for medicine or the illegal but widespread custom of giving dowry to marry off daughters, he explained. Banks, if they exist in his area, are unwilling to le- land.
Backwardness and submissiveness flow from Hindustan’s rigid hereditary class structure, said Agnivesh.
So the laborers with only his labour or that of his family to mortgage, goes to the landlord.
Nothing is written down, no: records kept. The landlord manipulates the loan agreement and charges high interest, Agnivesh said.
Rajmohan Devi,an undernourished young woman who worked five years to pay off a 10 dollar loan.
At the end of the first year, the landlord told me I had still not paid the interest and would have to work another year. The same thing happened at the end of that year. I did not know how much I owed.
Escape is usually impossible, sometimes dangerous. The chains of dependency that bind labourer to employer are as strong as any steel.
There is often no other source of employment in the area and the labourer has no money. How can he leave? Asked Ramesh warm.
Sometimes bondage passes from generation to generation, with a son working to pay off his father’s debt.
Those who raise their voices against such exploitation are ruthlessly silenced, sometimes killed, Ramesh waram said.
The police are reluctant to intervene; their political masters are the landowners.
Cases of abuse are often reported in newspapers but action is rarely taken, Agnivesh took up the case this year of 32 children bonded in a carpet-weaving factory that were branded with hot irons as a punishment. Nobody has been prosecuted.
Despite the Fronts efforts, it has freed 20,000 workers in the past five years, Agnivesh believes growing landlessness coupled with chronic rural unemployment and an exploding population will ensure the survival of bondage.
Agents tour the poorer rural areas recruiting labour for construction sites, brick kilns, quarries, cigarette factories and in the case of children, carpet-weaving factories.
They are loaned money by contractor to move to the towns and the cycle of debt, dependency and bondage begins, Agnivesh said.
Part of the prosperity of northern states like Punjab and Haryana is built on migrant labourer who qualifies as bonded under the law because they earn less than the minimum wage and are in debt to their employer.
Buildings for the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi were completed on time under the supervision of the present Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi only with the use of bonded labour, the Front said.
The fact that this was illegal did not seem to bother too many people, he said.
India largely ignores their right. There is some sympathy when stories appear in the press or parliament but bonded labourers do not represent important votes for politicians so they are unlikely to get much attention, Agnivesh said,
Article extracted from this publication >> August 15, 1986
