A temporary relief from bonded labour

Panchanan Muduli (44), with two sons and a daughter living in Balangir, a district of Western Odisha that is dependent on rain for agriculture, left home for Hyderabad in early 2025. She was promised a job on a poultry farm and a place to sleep with the chicks she would raise. Although wages were meager at just £10.00 a month, he thought he would at least have a regular income to send home. The smell, humiliation and loneliness proved unbearable. About a month later he resigned and began his journey home.

Desperation overtook him at the Vijayawada railway station. A fishing farm owner offered him a job. Muduli agreed. What came next was worse: 15-hour days, makeshift shelters, and a job that tied him to his place of employment. He says he and other workers lived under constant surveillance and fear for seven months.

One day, when a relative of the owner died, the workers ran away. They walked for hours through the jungle to escape captivity in Perumallapuram village in Andhra Pradesh’s East Godavari District. Muduli was later rescued by the authorities of Telangana’s Nagarkurnool district and declared a bonded laborer under the Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act, 1976.

He returned to his village, Dumerpadar, in the hope that the law would help him rebuild his life. Months passed. No help came, he says. Muduli chose to migrate again within five months of being rescued. This time with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. They moved to a brick kiln in Telangana in November 2025 and continue to work there.

The Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act, 1976, which was then a turning point in Indian history, completed 50 years of enactment in February 2026. It came into force retroactively in October 1975 and is “a system of forced or partially coerced labor by which the debtor enters into an agreement with the creditor…” The reasons are usually economic or caste-based, both of which cover the law.

As per the Act, which has not been amended since its coming into force, the State government is required to conduct periodic surveys to detect the existence of bonded workers. However, the latest data source is Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC)-2011. According to his assessment, 8,304 wage laborers, mostly tribals, were rescued and released in Odisha. The number of legally released bonded workers in the country was 1.65 lakh. However, the Odisha government never disclosed what action it took to identify and rehabilitate these 8,304 people.

Fifty years after its enactment, the term “bonded laborer” continues to conjure images of slavery, which many believed to have disappeared with colonial rule in India. Every district administration in Odisha has been asked to create a corpus fund of ₹ 10 lakh so that immediate relief can be provided to the released freelance labour. Half of the districts in Odisha have no such fund.

Individuals and families migrate

In 2017, 35-year-old Dambarudhar Majhi from Odisha’s Nuapada district had migrated to Karnataka in search of survival, but found himself trapped in what he now calls the worst ordeal of his life. He and his family were sleeping next to piles of rotting chicks. Cleaning up messes from dawn to dusk became routine.

“The three months we spent on the poultry farm felt more like punishment than work. It was worse than the hell described in mythology,” he says. “The owner had promised us 10,000 Indian rupees a month, but salaries rarely came. He wouldn’t let us go,” Majhi recalls. In desperation, the couple secretly sent their children to live with a relative. By chance, the children came across labor officials at Yesvantpur Junction railway station. A rescue operation followed. “We gained our freedom that day,” he says.

Nine years later, the recovery certificate is kept carefully at their home, but the promised rehabilitation under the Debtor Labor System (Abolition) Act has never materialized, he says. Afraid of returning to immigration, the couple now survives by working daily, but they can only afford one meal a day.

Their story is reminiscent of that of Jayaraj Jagat from Nuapada, who was rescued along with his wife from a brick kiln in Tamil Nadu in 2012. They say each of them received ₹19,000 as rehabilitation assistance. For a short time, this money brought them relief and dignity and allowed them to stay in their villages. But the poverty and lack of earning opportunities in their villages were relentless.

Jayaraj Jagat and his wife, who hail from Odisha’s Nuapada district and were rescued as slave laborers in 2012, work in a brick kiln in Telangana. Photo: Special arrangement

By 2017, the couple had no choice but to emigrate again. They returned to the same cycle of exploitation. For six months each year, they lived in 6-foot-high makeshift shelters in brick kilns, working up to 14 hours a day. Illness was a luxury they could not afford. Hunger, debt and obligation left them no way out. They are currently working in a brick kiln in Telangana.

Contrary to popular belief, freedom is relaxation

Delays in rehabilitation assistance are a problem, especially for interstate migrant workers. “When rehabilitation is delayed, rescued workers are pushed back into the same occupation, no matter how harsh or exploitative the conditions,” says Umi Daniel, Director of Migration and Education at Aid et Action, an international nonprofit organization that works at the intersection of poverty and education.

Timely financial support is only the first step. “We may have physically freed people from their captors, but we could not free them from the debt that bound them. Helping them get back on their feet is a long-term process,” Daniel adds. Without ongoing support, rescue becomes a temporary interruption, not a permanent escape.

The law requires close monitoring of rescued slave workers, with their details recorded in official records. It also requires the District Collector to appoint an officer to oversee their rehabilitation and provide long-term protection. The purpose of district-level vigilance committees headed by the collector is to support this process.

Binod Senapati, Odisha nodal officer in charge of rehabilitation of released bonded workers, said he was unaware that people were not being helped. “When other States inform us about the rescue and release of our workers, we immediately inform the District Collectors to deal with them,” he says.

Daniel says rehabilitation cannot be reduced to a one-time cash payment. “Survivors need to be connected to anti-poverty programs such as housing, livelihood plans and social security to break the cycle of vulnerability,” says Daniel.

Jagat echoes this: “I am good at tailoring. My wife also knows some tailoring. If we had been given hand-holding support, I would not have migrated to another state to work in such harsh working conditions.”

Daniel says there has been a sustained response in Odisha, where around 1,200 rescued bonded laborers from 500 families have been rehabilitated (between 2010 and 2015) and connected to government welfare programmes, “helping them rebuild their lives in dignity”.

Before 2016, the Center and State government used to pay ₹10,000 each as assistance after a worker was rescued from captivity. Under the 1976 law, the identification, release and rehabilitation of freed, bonded labor is the direct responsibility of the States and Union Territories.

However, in 2016, the Ministry of Labor and Employment introduced the Central Sector Program for Rehabilitation of Indebted Workers, which was later strengthened and restarted in 2022. The scheme, which is fully funded by the Centre, does not require any matching contribution from State governments. Each rescued worker is guaranteed immediate assistance of up to ₹ 30,000 followed by gradual rehabilitation assistance of ₹ 1 lakh, ₹ 2 lakh or ₹ 3 lakh depending on gender, severity of exploitation and vulnerability. The aid is intended to be a basis for rebuilding lives after captivity. However, hundreds of released workers continue to wait for rehabilitation.

Few understand this gap better than seventy-year-old civil rights activist Baghambar Patnaik, who took up the case of 1,472 released workers before the Orissa Human Rights Commission. The petition covers 1,085 workers from Balangir district, 44 from Subarnapur district, 28 from Bargarh district, 114 from Nuapada district and 201 from Kalahandi district.

“A workers’ collective called Shramvahini coordinated the rescue of hundreds of workers from different states. Most of them were migrant workers from western Odisha who had endured bail conditions,” says Patnaik. “They were subjected to summary trials before Sub-Divisional Magistrates in the districts from which they were rescued and issued discharge certificates. But rehabilitation was never followed,” he points out, adding that many returned to the same exploitative work they had escaped from.

The activist, who spent some time in jail while leading a silent rally of barbers, largely attributes the failure to poor awareness and poor accountability within the administration. “There is a law. There are provisions. What is missing is timely action,” he says.

Caste based slavery

In many villages, slavery persists not through chains but through caste. For generations, families belonging to the barber and laundress communities were trapped in hereditary servitude; They paid not with wages but with a few kilos of rice. The unwritten but strictly enforced regulation is passed from one generation to the next.

“During death rituals, we are forced to perform tasks such as shaving villagers, cleaning leftover food after feasts, and carrying ceremonial offerings on our shoulders,” says Lalatendu Barik of Brahampur village.

“This job has been imposed on us from birth. There is no escape. Anyone who resists faces a social boycott,” he continues.

When members of these communities began to resist the system, reactions were swift. They faced intimidation, ostracism and economic isolation from dominant caste peasants.

Following sustained protests by people and intervention by civil society groups, hundreds of people were officially identified as bonded laborers and issued release certificates under the 1976 Act. But they say admission does not translate into rehabilitation.

“Due to lack of administrative sensitivity, the State government could not send rehabilitation recommendations to the Centre,” says Patnaik, who has moved both the Orissa High Court and the Orissa Human Rights Commission to seek justice for the affected families. “Years later, the government revoked most of the release certificates rather than extending aid,” he claims.

As many as 1,283 people from tehsils including Brahmagiri, Krushnaprasad, Delang and Nimapara in Puri district were once officially recognized as wage labourers. Today, most of these certificates have been revoked.

Barık is among them. “I was declared a bonded worker on March 3, 2016. However, a report dated April 8, 2025 says that I am no longer one because I have stopped performing traditional services,” he says.

Patnaik calls this a denial of reality. “This reflects profound bureaucratic ignorance,” he says. “The government does not want to accept that caste-based slavery still exists and falls under the Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act, 1976,” he says.

Daniel says implementation of the law remains weak because it requires coordination between various departments such as labour, revenue, panchayati raj and police. “There is no clear ownership, defined roles or standard operating procedures to ensure the historic Act benefits the most vulnerable,” he says.

satyasundar.b@thehindu.co.in

Edited by Sunalini Mathew.