Bonded labour was abolished in India half a century ago, at least in law. The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976 extinguished bonded debts and criminalised debt-based forced labour, but, while ambitious in its promise, it has remained anaemic in its enforcement. Bonded labour is not merely illegal under statute; it is unconstitutional. Article 23 of the Constitution explicitly prohibits trafficking, begar, and other forms of forced labour, making the persistence of bondage not just a labour policy failure, but a constitutional betrayal. The gravest indictment is not merely that bonded labour persists, but that it remains largely invisible within official governance; the state often refuses to acknowledge what it cannot deny. Yet the reality is stark. In Muzaffarnagar, a worker’s escape from a tote-making factory led to the rescue of 13 labourers allegedly held in conditions of confinement, assault, and near-captivity, with reports suggesting deaths within the premises. In Mysuru’s Bevanahalli, 18 labourers were rescued from a brick kiln where they were trapped in a cycle of coercion, debt, and exploitation. These are not isolated crimes but symptoms of a deeper malaise.

Public discourse often treats bonded labour as a feudal relic of colonial India, confined to zamindars and hereditary debt bondage. That is a convenient fiction. Bonded labour did not disappear; it evolved—migrating from farms to factories, from caste-bound villages to modern supply chains. Today, it survives not despite economic growth, but often because of the structural exclusions that underpin it.

A recent study by the National Campaign Committee for the Eradication of Bonded Labour, the Mehnatkash Association, and the IDEAS office at O.P. Jindal Global University paints a devastating picture. Based on testimonies from 950 rescued workers across 19 states, the report concluded that bonded labour remains widespread, deeply embedded, and sustained by systemic enforcement failures. The more telling number is not the count of rescues, but of those the state refuses to recognise as bonded labourers. Many are freed from physical bondage only to be denied compensation, rehabilitation, and legal justice.

The scale of the crisis is staggering. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that roughly 11 million people in India live in conditions constituting modern slavery, the highest absolute number globally. This category includes forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking, and forced marriages. Such figures challenge a comforting national narrative: that exploitation in India is largely informal, accidental, or incidental. The evidence suggests something far more disturbing—coercion is often systemic, profitable, and socially normalised.

Equally alarming is the rehabilitation deficit. In 2023–24, India reportedly rehabilitated only 468 bonded labourers against an annual target running into lakhs. The arithmetic alone reveals institutional failure. A legal framework that rescues hundreds while millions remain vulnerable is not functioning as intended; it is performing symbolic compliance. With vigilance committees mandated under the act often defunct, district surveys sporadic, and police frequently reducing cases to lesser offences instead of invoking bonded labour laws, the result is predictable: rescue without prosecution, and liberation without deterrence.

To view bonded labour solely as economic exploitation is to miss its deeper architecture: in India, bondage is also profoundly shaped by caste power. The same survey found that every respondent, 100 percent, belonged to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, or Other Backward Classes. This is not a statistical coincidence. Bondage in India is rarely caste-neutral. Debt may be the formal instrument of coercion, but caste frequently supplies the social infrastructure that makes coercion enforceable. Hierarchy reduces bargaining power. Social stigma suppresses resistance. Dependence becomes hereditary.

This continuity between caste and labour exploitation exposes a central contradiction in India’s development story. The country celebrates itself as a digital powerhouse, a startup hub, and a future manufacturing giant. Yet beneath the rhetoric of economic ascendance lies a labour regime sustained by vulnerability. The worker making bricks, garments, tote bags, carpets, fireworks, or fishing nets often inhabits a universe entirely disconnected from the aspirational India of policy speeches. This contradiction has now acquired international consequences.

Even as India and the United States (US) move closer to a Bilateral Trade Agreement, the labour question has become impossible to ignore. The Office of the United States Trade Representative recently identified India among countries potentially facing additional tariffs over forced labour presence in supply chains. Washington’s proposed Section 301 action could impose additional duties of up to 12.5 percent on imports from countries deemed to have failed to effectively prevent goods linked to forced labour from entering commerce. India was specifically listed among 54 economies considered deficient in imposing and enforcing such prohibitions.

This development should unsettle New Delhi, not because Washington is morally impeccable—global trade often tolerates selective outrage—but because the criticism contains an uncomfortable truth. Bonded labour is no longer merely a domestic rights issue. It is now a trade issue, a supply-chain issue, and a geopolitical credibility issue. The world increasingly demands traceability, ethical sourcing, and labour compliance. A country aspiring to become the world’s factory cannot afford supply chains tainted by coercion.

Yet official denial remains pervasive. This denial operates through administrative mechanisms. One of the most consequential is the withholding of release certificates. Without these certificates, rescued workers may not legally qualify as bonded labourers for rehabilitation schemes. This creates a perverse reality: liberation without recognition. A worker may escape captivity but remain trapped in bureaucratic limbo.

The logic of bondage has also evolved. It no longer always resembles chains and locked rooms, though such horrors still exist. Contemporary bonded labour often operates through debt advances, wage withholding, document confiscation, and mobility restrictions. Employers seize Aadhaar cards, voter IDs, and bank documents, effectively erasing worker autonomy. Workers become economically immobilised and civically disenfranchised. They cannot travel, access welfare, or even meaningfully participate in democratic processes.

The confiscation of identity documents reveals something profound: bonded labour today is not merely about extracting labour but controlling personhood. The employer becomes the creditor, jailer, and gatekeeper to citizenship.

The most insidious feature of modern bondage is that it often hides behind consent. Workers may initially agree to advances or contracts. But consent under extreme deprivation is not meaningful freedom. When hunger compels acceptance of exploitative terms, choice becomes coercion by other means. Labour law often struggles to recognise this grey zone, allowing exploitation to masquerade as voluntary employment. The Supreme Court recognised this in the landmark 1984 Bandhua Mukti Morcha case, holding that bonded labour need not involve visible chains; economic compulsion, debt, and deprivation themselves can amount to coercion.

This is why economic explanations alone are insufficient. Bonded labour persists because of an ecosystem of vulnerabilities: landlessness, migration, caste discrimination, illiteracy, weak unions, and a heavily informal labour market. Nearly 90 percent of India’s workforce remains informal. Informality reduces documentation, weakens oversight, and disperses accountability. When production is fragmented across subcontractors, principal firms can plausibly deny knowledge of abuse while continuing to profit from it. The moral burden, thus, cannot stop at the contractor. Bonded labour often survives through layered subcontracting that allows principal firms, brands, and supply-chain beneficiaries to profit from coercion while maintaining plausible deniability.

Interstate migration further intensifies vulnerability. Workers transported hundreds of kilometres from home often lose language, community, and bargaining power all at once, becoming almost entirely dependent on labour contractors for wages, mobility, and survival.

The case of workers, including children, trafficked into isolated fishing camps along the Krishna River illustrates the geography of invisibility. No roads, no mobile network, no oversight. These spaces are by design: bonded labour thrives where the law is absent, and isolation becomes a tool of coercion. But perhaps the least examined dimension of bonded labour is its socially sanctioned forms. Forced marriage remains one such channel. It receives little attention because exploitation disguised as custom attracts less scrutiny than exploitation in factories, and can function as long-term unpaid labour extraction, particularly for women and girls. Domestic labour, reproductive labour, and sexual coercion become normalised within social institutions. For women, bondage is less visible, embedded in domestic work, home-based piece labour, beedi rolling, embroidery, and care work, where exploitation is rooted.

This points to a broader problem: India often recognises bondage only when it appears spectacularly brutal. Locked rooms trigger outrage; normalized coercion does not. The moral imagination of law remains too narrow.

There is also an ideological dimension to this neglect. Indian policy discourse increasingly celebrates growth metrics—GDP, exports, unicorns, infrastructure, and manufacturing targets. But growth statistics can obscure labour realities. A nation may build industrial capacity while simultaneously reproducing coercive labour relations. Output can rise even as dignity collapses.

This is not merely a governance failure. It is also a philosophical failure in how development is conceived. Development cannot be reduced to production expansion. Economic success built upon coerced labour is not development but extraction under modern branding.

India’s bonded labour problem, therefore, raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly was abolished in 1976? The law eliminated the formal legal legitimacy of bondage. It did not eliminate the material conditions that reproduce bondage. Debt survived. Caste survived. Informality survived. Impunity survived.

In many sectors, bondage simply changed vocabulary.

The problem is not a lack of law, but a lack of political will. Rescue operations, necessary as they are, remain reactive, arriving only after exploitation has hardened into abuse. Genuine reform requires stronger inspections, worker organisation, swift certification, and meaningful rehabilitation, with accountability reaching beyond contractors to those who ultimately profit. Bonded labour is not a historical residue awaiting extinction with modernity; it is deeply woven into contemporary capitalism, surviving because institutions find convenience in silence.

The rescued workers in Muzaffarnagar and Mysuru are not merely victims of individual criminal employers. They are casualties of a system that promises constitutional equality while tolerating economic servitude. Their stories expose the distance between law and lived reality.

India abolished bonded labour fifty years ago in statute. It has yet to be abolished in society.

Until that changes, every rescue operation will remain both a victory and an indictment: a victory for those who reclaim freedom, and an indictment of a republic still unable—or unwilling—to ensure that freedom is not negotiable at the factory gate. A republic cannot claim to have abolished bondage while millions remain free only in law, and not in life.

-Amal Chandra is an author, policy analyst, and columnist. His debut book, The Essential, featuring a foreword by former Union External Affairs Minister Adv. Salman Khurshid, was launched by Dr. Shashi Tharoor, with whom he works on public affairs, alongside V.D. Satheesan, the current Chief Minister of Kerala.