JOIN USIt is a matter of shame that India, a country that is proud of its vibrant democracy, has the world’s largest number of people living in conditions of slavery. According to the Global Slavery Index 2013, India is home to 14 million of the world’s roughly 30 million living as slaves, defined broadly as those living in debt bondage, forced marriage and human trafficking. In terms of proportion of population that is enslaved, India stands fourth after Mauritania, Haiti and Pakistan.
The wide prevalence of modern slavery in India can be attributed to debt bondage and bonded labour. Although bonded labour was banned in 1976, it survives to date. Poverty forces families into a debt trap. Unable to pay off the interest on their debts let alone the principal, people are compelled to offer themselves or their children as bonded labour. This works well for landlords and others, who want to ensure a cheap and reliable supply of labour, one over which they exercise total control.
Untouchability and the Devadasi system, despite the constitutional ban on their practice, serve to justify human bondage, whether for economic or sexual reasons. Thousands are sold into prostitution. They cannot get out of this terrible trade and are condemned to a lifetime of exploitation.
India has put in place a host of progressive laws prohibiting forced, bonded and child labour, upholding minimum wages. These clearly have failed to prevent bondage. Do these laws have loopholes? Or are they not being implemented? Studies have drawn attention to the reluctance of police to act firmly in situations of obvious enslavement of people. Some are themselves key links in the human trafficking network, others refrain from taking on politically powerful landlords and mine owners. Importantly, victims of bondage are not aware of their constitutional rights. They lack easy access to institutions that will help them break the shackles. A few that manage to do so are unable to remain free as poverty and lack of skills denies them other options.
That 14 million people live in bondage in this country is a damning indictment of the quality of our democracy. We may have regular elections but that make us at best an electoral democracy. When a democracy lacks participatory content and especially when millions of its people live in bondage, it claims to be a meaningful democracy ring hollow.
How can we claim to be a free people when such a large number of us are in chains?