Bonded Labor

Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia

Siddharth Kara

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231528016
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

Siddharth Kara's Sex Trafficking has become a critical resource for its revelations into an unconscionable business, and its detailed analysis of the trade's immense economic benefits and human cost. This volume is Kara's second, explosive study of slavery, this time focusing on the deeply entrenched and wholly unjust system of bonded labor.

Drawing on eleven years of research in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, Kara delves into an ancient and ever-evolving mode of slavery that ensnares roughly six out of every ten slaves in the world and generates profits that exceeded $17.6 billion in 2011. In addition to providing a thorough economic, historical, and legal overview of bonded labor, Kara travels to the far reaches of South Asia, from cyclone-wracked southwestern Bangladesh to the Thar desert on the India-Pakistan border, to uncover the brutish realities of such industries as hand-woven-carpet making, tea and rice farming, construction, brick manufacture, and frozen-shrimp production. He describes the violent enslavement of millions of impoverished men, women, and children who toil in the production of numerous products at minimal cost to the global market. He also follows supply chains directly to Western consumers, vividly connecting regional bonded labor practices to the appetites of the world. Kara's pioneering analysis encompasses human trafficking, child labor, and global security, and he concludes with specific initiatives to eliminate the system of bonded labor from South Asia once and for all.

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Bonded Labor

AN OVERVIEW

The system of bonded labour has been prevalent in various parts of the country since long prior to the attainment of political freedom and it constitutes an ugly and shameful feature of our national life. This system based on exploitation by a few socially and economically powerful persons trading on the misery and suffering of large numbers of men and holding them in bondage is a relic of a feudal hierarchical society which hypocritically proclaims the divinity of men but treats large masses of people belonging to the lower rungs of the social ladder or economically impoverished segments of society as dirt and chattel. This system … is not only an affront to basic human dignity but also constitutes a gross and revolting violation of constitutional values.

—CHIEF JUSTICE P. N. BHAGWATI,

BANDHUA MUKTI MORCHA VS. UNION OF INDIA, 1983

A MAN NAMED AJAY

An elderly man named Ajay led me to his thatched hut to have a cup of tea.¹ We sat on mats in the dirt, amid his meager possessions and a small cot on which he slept. Dust, insects, and lizards abounded. I gave Ajay a bottle of water, which he heated in a dented pot over a small firepit dug into the ground. With shaky hands, he produced two small metal mugs. As we waited for the water to boil, Ajay rubbed his fragile legs. His skin was so brittle, I feared it would crack if he pressed any harder.

Depleted after a long day of research, I turned my gaze outside, toward the setting sun. A bright orange light set the heavens afire, and a resplendent golden hue radiated from the vast mustard fields. Sensing twilight was near, swarming blue jays erupted into song, and intrepid mosquitoes emerged to track down fresh blood.

The water warmed slowly, so Ajay added another piece of wood to the fire. It hissed and cracked as it burned to ash. Though his workday was completed, his two sons and grandchildren were still toiling not far away at brick kilns. His beloved wife, Sarika, was no longer with him. Barely able to make it through each day, Ajay’s withering body and weathered face cried countless tales of woe. His frayed skin scarcely covered the crumbling bones beneath, and he labored to draw sufficient air into his lungs. He had no money, no assets, nothing of his own, not even the dilapidated roof over his head. The spark of life had long ago been extinguished from Ajay’s body when I met him that day in the rural reaches of Bihar, India, after he had suffered almost five decades of exploitation as a bonded laborer. No one I ever met had been a slave longer than he.

The water did not quite come to a boil, but Ajay asked for the tea. I broke open a few tea bags from my backpack and poured the tea into the water. A few minutes later, Ajay poured two cups for us to drink. Interspersed with long pauses and painful recollections, Ajay shared his story:²

I took the loan of Rs. 800 ($18) for my marriage to Sarika. My father and mother died when I was young, so it was up to me to arrange our wedding. I promised Sarika after we finished our pheras³ that I would make her a happy life. I felt so proud. I was only seventeen at that time. What did I know?

Since the time of our wedding, we worked in these fields for the landowner, who loaned me the money. When he died, we worked for his son. From the beginning, we were promised wages each day of a few rupees. I felt my debt would be repaid in two years at most, but the landowner made so many deductions from our wages, and each year we had to take more loans for food or tenancy. Sometimes, the landowner would tell me at the end of the season that I owe him this amount or that amount, but I could never know what the real amount was. He did not allow us to leave this place for other work, even when there was no work here to do. My brothers and I have worked in this area all our lives. My two sons will inherit my debt when I am gone.

When Sarika became very ill three years ago, the landowner refused to give me a loan for medicines. There was no doctor here, and he would not send us to a medical clinic. He said my debts were too high and I was too old to repay this expense. I pleaded with him to save Sarika, but he told me only God can determine her fate. I was desperate, but I did not know what to do. Sarika did not want our sons to take more debts for her medicine, so she forbade me from telling them when she was ill. How could I deny her wish?

Our lives are filled with so much pain. I did not give Sarika a good life. For many years, I wanted to take my life. I told Sarika I had cursed us, but she said that the suffering in our lives was not so great as others. I told her she should have married a rich man and been happy. Maybe then she would still be alive.

I am old now, and I can no longer work. The landowner has little use for me. My life is almost over. I wait only for the end. No one in this country cares about people like us. We live and die, and no one but ourselves knows we have drawn breath.

WHAT IS BONDED LABOR?

Bonded labor is the most extensive form of slavery in the world today. There were approximately eighteen to 20.5 million bonded laborers in the world at the end of 2011, roughly 84 percent to 88 percent of whom were in South Asia. This means that approximately half of the slaves in the world are bonded laborers in South Asia and that approximately 1.1 percent of the total population of South Asia is ensnared in bonded labor.

Bonded labor is at once the most ancient and most contemporary face of human servitude. While it spans the breadth and depth of all manner of servile labor going back millennia, the products of present-day bonded labor touch almost every aspect of the global economy, including frozen shrimp and fish, tea, coffee, rice, wheat, diamonds, gems, cubic zirconia, glassware, brassware, carpets, limestone, marble, slate, salt, matches, cigarettes, bidis (Indian cigarettes), apparel, fireworks, knives, sporting goods, and many other products. Virtually everyone’s life, everywhere in the world, is touched by bonded labor in South Asia. For this reason alone, it is incumbent that we understand, confront, and eliminate this evil.

In its most essential form, bonded labor involves the exploitative interlinking of labor and credit agreements between parties. On one side of the agreement, a party possessing an abundance of assets and capital provides credit to the other party, who, because he lacks almost any assets or capital, pledges his labor to work off the loan. Given the severe power imbalances between the parties, the laborer is often severely exploited. Bonded labor occurs when the exploitation ascends to the level of slavelike abuse. In these cases, once the capital is borrowed, numerous tactics are used by the lender to extract the slave labor. The borrower is often coerced to work at paltry wage levels to repay the debt. Exorbitant interest rates are charged (from 10 percent to more than 20 percent per month), and money lent for future medicine, clothes, or basic subsistence is added to the debt. In most cases of bonded labor, up to half or more of the day’s wage is deducted for debt repayment, and further deductions are often made as penalties for breaking rules or poor work performance. The laborer uses what paltry income remains to buy food and supplies from the lender, at heavily inflated prices. The bonded laborers rarely have enough money to meet their subsistence needs, so they are forced to borrow more money to survive. Any illness or injury spells disaster. Incremental money must be borrowed not only for medicine but also because the injured individuals cannot work, and thus the family is not earning enough income for daily consumption, requiring more loans and deeper indebtedness. Sometimes the debts last a few years, and sometimes the debts are passed on to future generations if the original borrower perishes without having repaid the debt (according to the lender). In my experience, this generational debt bondage is a waning phenomenon, though it does still occur throughout South Asia. More often, the terms of debt bondage agreements last a few years or even just a season. However, because of a severe lack of any reasonable alternative income or credit source, the laborer must return time and again to the lender, which recommences his exploitation in an ongoing cycle of debt bondage. This vicious cycle of bonded labor is represented in figure 1.1.

The term “bonded labor” is typically used interchangeably with “debt bondage,” though the former term has been more often used to describe the distinctive mode of debt bondage that has persisted in South Asia across centuries. Beyond South Asia, there have been numerous variations on tied labor-credit economic arrangements spanning centuries of human history, commencing with the early agricultural economies. Aristotle wrote about bonded labor and other forms of slavery in his Politics,⁴ and various forms of bonded labor were prevalent in ancient Rome and Egypt. The medieval Western European economy from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries was typified by a manorial arrangement between a landed class of lords that exploited the unpaid agricultural labor of landless serfs. The agricultural system of Mughal India (1526–1707) constitutes an Indian variant of this traditional European feudalism. The economic system of Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) provides another example in which a landed class, the shogunate, exploited the bonded labor of landless peasants and untouchables (burakumin) within the structure of a highly stratified class society. Finally, the peonage system in the American South after the U.S. Civil War was also typified by exploitative debt bondage arrangements.⁵ These and other forms of debt bondage–based economic relations were almost entirely overturned throughout much of the world by a mix of social revolution and transition to industrialized market economies. No such revolution ever took place in South Asia. As a result, more than four out of five debt bondage slaves in the world today reside in the region. There are still informal systems of debt bondage throughout the world—in particular with the widespread practice of recruiting migrant domestic servants into debt bondage⁶—but only in South Asia can one still find a truly systemic, archaic, feudal system of slave-labor exploitation of one class of individuals by another. This system represents a severe and reprehensible violation of basic human rights. It is a form of slavery that is perpetuated by custom, corruption, greed, and social apathy. It is an oppressive arrangement that degrades human dignity through the pitiless exploitation of the vulnerable and desperate. The phenomenon is complex and ever evolving, but there are several salient features that are almost always shared by bonded laborers in South Asia.

Figure 1.1. Bonded labor vicious cycle.

KEY FEATURES SHARED BY BONDED LABORERS

Perhaps the most important feature shared by bonded laborers in South Asia is extreme poverty. Each and every bonded laborer I met lived in abject poverty without a reliable means of securing sufficient subsistence income. Almost 1.2 billion people in South Asia live on incomes of less than $2 per day, approximately nine hundred million of whom are in India alone (see appendix F). Adjusting the $2 metric for inflation (especially food inflation) from its inception in 2000 results in a number that exceeds $3 at the end of 2011, which would capture an even greater share of India’s population as living in poverty, despite the country’s stellar economic growth across the last two decades. Today, there are more billionaires in India than in the United Kingdom, but the number of people living on less than $2 per day in India is more than fifteen times the entire population of the United Kingdom. This staggering chasm in income distribution utterly debases social relationships. This debasement, in turn, allows one set of privileged people to self-justifiably exploit (or ignore the exploitation of) the masses of “inferior” classes. Both sets tend to accept this formula, the rich with entitlement and the poor with fatalism. This self-entitlement may also explain the embarrassing lack of charity among rich and middle-class Indians. Individuals and corporations in India are responsible for only 10 percent of the nation’s charitable giving, whereas in the United States the number is 75 percent and in the United Kingdom 34 percent.⁷ Unethical and unsustainable income asymmetries and acute and grinding poverty across South Asia are unquestionably among the most powerful forces promoting numerous forms of suffering and exploitation, including bonded labor.

The second feature shared by almost all bonded laborers in South Asia is that they belong to a minority ethnic group or caste. The issue of caste will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, but, in summary, it is crucial to understand that there remains a stratum of human beings in South Asia who are deemed exploitable and expendable by society at large. Be they dalits or tharu, adivasi or janjati, minority ethnicities and castes in South Asia are the victims of a social system that at best exiles them and at worst disdains them.

Almost all bonded laborers lack access to formal credit markets. This is primarily because, other than their labor, they typically have no collateral to offer against a loan.⁸ Coupled with an inability to earn sufficient income to save money, this lack of access drives poor peasants to informal creditors, such as exploitative local moneylenders, landowners, shopkeepers, and work contractors (jamadars), who capitalize on their desperation to ensnare them in bonded slavery.

Other common features shared by bonded laborers include a lack of education and literacy, which renders them easier to exploit, especially when it comes to keeping track of their debits and credits. Landlessness is another near-universal feature shared by bonded laborers. Without land, individuals have no security or means to cultiv...