അരനൂറ്റാണ്ടിന് ശേഷവും തുടരുന്ന അടിമപ്പണി: നിയമം ഉണ്ടായിട്ടും ഇന്ത്യയിൽ എന്തുകൊണ്ട് ജാഗ്രത കുറയുന്നു?

A recent rescue operation in Andhra Pradesh offers a disturbing reminder of a system India abolished by law half a century ago.

On October 1, The New Indian Express reported that 98 migrant workers, including 30 women and 38 children, had been rescued from alleged bonded labour in charcoal-making units spread across ten locations in Anantapur district.

The workers were migrant families from Maharashtra. Some said they had been living and working there for periods ranging from two to five years.

THE LAW

The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act was enacted in 1976 and is deemed to have come into force from October 25, 1975. It abolished the bonded labour system, extinguished bonded debts and made enforcement of bondage an offence.

A CONSTITUTIONAL WRONG

Article 23 of the Constitution expressly prohibits begar and other similar forms of forced labour and makes contravention punishable by law.

Article 21 adds the fundamental protection of life with human dignity.

Where children below 14 are employed in a factory or mine or in any other hazardous employment, Article 24 provides an additional constitutional prohibition.

JUDICIAL EMPHASIS ON DIGNITY

In Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India, decided on December 16, 1983, the Supreme Court gave the right to life a particularly important meaning in the context of exploited workers.

It held that Article 21 includes the right to live with human dignity, encompassing protection of the health and strength of workers, protection of children against abuse and just and humane conditions of work.

It also made clear that where welfare legislation already exists, failure by the State to secure its implementation can amount to denial of that right.

A TROUBLING QUESTION

A worker reportedly escaped from one of the worksites in Anantapur and approached social workers in Maharashtra. The information then travelled across State borders, after which Revenue, Labour, Police and Women and Child Development officials mounted a coordinated rescue operation.

The response deserves acknowledgement. But the circumstances inevitably raise a larger question: how could so many workers reportedly remain in such conditions, across several locations and in some cases for years, without the preventive machinery detecting them earlier?

NOT AN ISOLATED CASE

In April 2026, the National Human Rights Commission heard 216 cases of alleged bonded labour involving brick kilns across districts of Uttar Pradesh. In July, it heard another 86 cases concerning brick kilns in Haryana.

THE PREVENTIVE MACHINERY ALREADY EXISTS

Besides prohibiting bonded labour, the Act did something equally important. The law expected the administration to look for bondage.

Section 12 places a duty on every District Magistrate and authorised officer to inquire whether bonded labour or any other form of forced labour is being enforced within the jurisdiction and, if so, to take action to eradicate it.

Sections 13 and 14 provide for Vigilance Committees at the district and sub-divisional levels.

Their functions extend beyond helping workers after release.

They include monitoring offences under the Act and conducting surveys to ascertain whether such offences are taking place.

That distinction is fundamental.

The statutory scheme is not intended merely to receive a complaint and organise a rescue.

It expects the administration to discover bondage.

This also means that a "nil" finding has to be interpreted carefully. It may mean bonded labour does not exist in a particular jurisdiction.

But where regular surveys are absent or Vigilance Committees are inactive, low identification cannot by itself establish absence of bonded labour.

FROM NATIONAL PRIORITY TO REDUCED VISIBILITY

Bonded labour abolition once enjoyed unusually high administrative visibility.

It was specifically included in the Twenty Point Programme announced in 1975.

In the years immediately following, implementation of the programme was reviewed through administrative mechanisms extending down to the district level.

I retain a personal recollection of that period. In 1977, while serving as an Education Officer with the Central Board for Workers Education, I attended one or two district-level meetings connected with implementation of the Twenty Point Programme under the chairmanship of the District Collector.

That personal experience cannot establish how uniformly such reviews took place throughout India. But it illustrates the administrative importance then attached to the programme.

SHRAMIK KALYAN

The Twenty Point Programme was subsequently revised.

Under Twenty Point Programme-2006, "Shramik Kalyan" covers social security for agricultural and unorganised labour, enforcement of minimum wages, prevention of child labour and welfare of women workers.

Bonded labour abolition is no longer a separately listed item.

It would be too simplistic to attribute the survival of bonded labour to that change.

But it is reasonable to ask whether an issue once subjected to distinct administrative monitoring has gradually lost some of its institutional visibility.

NHRC HAS ALREADY IDENTIFIED THE WEAKNESS

This concern is not based only on individual rescue cases.

The NHRC's 2021-22 Annual Report specifically identified among the continuing problems the lack of effective functioning of Vigilance Committees at district and sub-divisional level. It recommended that such committees be operationalised throughout the country and that their constitution and functioning be reflected on a national portal so that their performance could be reviewed and accountability fixed.

Its 2021 advisory went further.

The proposed National Portal on Bonded Labour, it said, should contain rehabilitation data, details of visits and functioning of Vigilance Committees, surveys, cash and non-cash assistance, pending criminal cases and their outcomes, and case-management information.

BUT THE GAP REMAINS

The Labour Ministry subsequently decided to revamp PENCiL into a more comprehensive portal covering child and bonded labour, and development work was taken up.

Parliamentary material in 2026, however, continued to describe PENCiL's existing functions primarily in terms of child-labour rehabilitation, case management and coordination with States, while broader strengthening and integration remained under way.

A comprehensive, publicly accessible national monitoring dashboard of the kind envisaged by the NHRC would therefore still fill an important accountability gap.

THE 2030 VISION AND THE NUMBERS

The scale of the gap becomes clearer when measured against the Government's own ambition.

In 2016, the Labour Ministry prepared a Fifteen-Year Vision for the total abolition of bonded labour by 2030.

It envisaged identifying, releasing and rehabilitating an estimated 1.84 crore bonded labourers, strengthening prosecution machinery and reaching a 100 per cent conviction rate.

The accompanying seven-year strategy envisaged budgetary capacity sufficient to cater to at least 12 lakh bonded labourers annually.

Recorded progress has been on a vastly smaller scale.

Government data show that 2,607 bonded labourers were rescued and rehabilitated in 2016-17, 6,413 in 2017-18, 2,246 in 2018-19, none recorded in 2019-20, 320 in 2020-21 and 1,676 in 2021-22 -- a total of 13,262 over six years.

Later Parliamentary records continued to show annual numbers in the hundreds rather than lakhs.

These are scheme-based administrative figures and should not be treated as a measure of the actual prevalence of bonded labour.

Identification, release certificates, State proposals and the stage of rehabilitation all affect the numbers reported. That is precisely why low recorded numbers cannot automatically be read as evidence that the underlying problem has disappeared.

The Labour Ministry's 2024-25 Annual Report separately recorded that 3,16,336 bonded labourers had been released cumulatively by January 7, 2025.

These different datasets themselves underline the need for uniform national reporting.

THE PROSECUTION TARGET TELLS ANOTHER STORY

The 2016 Vision did not stop with rescue and rehabilitation. It also sought to strengthen prosecution machinery and reach a 100 per cent conviction rate.

The Act itself provides an expedited mechanism.

Section 21 permits offences under the Act to be tried summarily, while Section 22 makes every offence cognizable, though bailable.

NCRB's Crime in India data for 2022 show why conviction percentages require context. The conviction rate under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act among trials completed was 86.1 per cent. But only 541 cases reached completion of trial, while 3,959 cases remained pending at year-end. The pendency rate was 87.9 per cent.

Thus a relatively high conviction percentage among completed trials can coexist with a large accumulation of unresolved cases.

ANOTHER WEAKNESS IN THE INFORMATION CHAIN

A Parliamentary Standing Committee's examination of the 2024-25 figures exposed another weakness in the information chain.

When it sought the status of summary trials or convictions relating to 246 bonded labourers who had received immediate assistance, the Labour Ministry said that such information becomes available to it from States when proposals for final rehabilitation assistance are submitted. Since the proposals then concerned immediate assistance alone, the summary-trial or conviction status had not yet been received from Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu.

A national monitoring system should be able to follow every case from identification and release to prosecution and final rehabilitation without waiting for a later reimbursement proposal.

FUNDS PROVIDED, BUT EXPENDITURE REMAINS LOW

Financial utilisation raises a related issue. Under the Central Sector Scheme for Rehabilitation of Bonded Labourers, actual expenditure was 3.69 crore against a revised estimate of 10 crore in 2021-22; 5.15 crore against 10 crore in 2022-23; 1.34 crore against 6.98 crore in 2023-24; and 1.31 crore against 6 crore in 2024-25. For 2025-26, expenditure stood at 1.06 crore against a revised estimate of 3 crore as of December 31, 2025.

The scheme is demand-driven.

Central funds are provided when States and Union Territories submit proposals. Low utilisation therefore cannot simply be described as lack of Central funding.

But the demand-driven nature of the scheme creates another connection that deserves scrutiny. If identification is weak, fewer workers receive release certificates; fewer cases then generate rehabilitation proposals; and expenditure will correspondingly remain low.

DISTRICT-LEVEL BONDED LABOUR REHABILITATION FUND

As required under the Scheme, a district-level Bonded Labour Rehabilitation Fund with a permanent corpus of at least 10 lakh is to be maintained for providing immediate assistance.

In 2026, the Labour Ministry told the Parliamentary Standing Committee that 15 States and Union Territories had furnished information regarding establishment of such funds and that it was following up with the remaining States and Union Territories.

The financial figures therefore need to be read alongside identification and administrative activity, not in isolation.

WHAT SHOULD NOW BE MEASURED

Fifty years after abolition, a major legislative amendment is not necessarily the first requirement. Much of the machinery already exists.

What is needed is to make its functioning visible and measurable.

A national bonded-labour portal should disclose, district by district and sub-division by sub-division, whether the statutory Vigilance Committees have been constituted; when they last met; what surveys and field inspections they conducted; how many workers they identified; how many release certificates were issued; what immediate and final rehabilitation was provided; whether district rehabilitation funds exist and are being used; how many offences were registered; how many summary trials were initiated and completed; and their outcomes.

Such disclosure would also help answer a fundamental statistical question: does a low number of identified bonded labourers reflect low prevalence, or low detection?

Periodic surveys should focus not merely on traditional sectors such as agriculture and brick kilns but on newer forms and locations of bondage.

India does not lack a constitutional mandate. It does not lack legislation. It does not lack District Magistrates, Vigilance Committees, powers of survey, criminal offences, summary-trial provisions or a rehabilitation scheme.

The real test is whether these mechanisms are functioning with sufficient regularity to identify bonded labour before exploitation continues for months or years unnoticed.

THE REAL MEASURE OF SUCCESS

Fifty years after abolition, the measure of success cannot be only how many bonded labourers were rescued.

It must also be how many were prevented from remaining invisible.