anti-slavery international and bonded labour
In India, our work focused on freeing the millions of men, women and children forced to work as bonded labourers. Regardless of their age, they work long hours labouring in quarries, brick kilns, agriculture and as domestics, receiving little or no pay in return for a loan needed for survival.
Even though this practice was outlawed in 1976 and the legal means needed to free bonded labourers exists, the problem is widespread. We, together with partners in three states, engaged the courts and police and trained former bonded labourers to help release those enslaved, succeeding in freeing a number of bonded labourers. Within two years we aim to free 900 people, creating a model for addressing the problem across South Asia.
Partner organisations, in collaboration with Anti-Slavery International held the National Convention on Bonded Labour in India. Over 5,000 activists took part, together with 600 representatives from organisations. The scale and success of the conference indicates the re-emergence of a newly invigorated national movement against bonded labour.
Many bonded labourers were released as a result of court actions including 686 bonded labourers working in agriculture and brick-kilns, in the Punjab region of India.
Information briefings led the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to describe bonded labour as one of the biggest problems in the Indian sub-continent, and to raise issue with the relevant authorities.
Case Study
The debt that led to Sigren becoming a bonded labourer at the age of 12, was 1,563 rupees -- just £18. Promised an annual salary of more than 15,630 rupees, Sigren worked for almost four years before his landlord agreed to pay him anything. “I was not allowed to call home. My owner snatched the phone number,” Sigren explained. “When I complained about not getting paid, he called the police to beat me up.”
Meetu Singh, a bonded labourer who has won his freedom, states: “We would hang ourselves before going back into bondage”. His case illustrates starkly the pressures surrounding bonded labourers. Although free now, his former owner has sufficient power to stop anyone else employing him, shops from serving him and doctors from treating him. His children have been barred from the local school and his cattle may not drink at the village pond. Sigren and Meetu were both freed thanks to the work of Volunteers for Social Justice (VSJ), Anti-Slavery International’s local partner in India. Working against the caste system, corruption and entrenched attitudes, VSJ fights slavery with one of the same tools used by British abolitionists 200 years ago: the law.
take action