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Social Structure and Social Change

Notes provides for the rehabilitation of bonded labourers who are freed from their creditors. The 1976
Act was amended in 1985 in which it was clarified that the contract workers and inter-state
migrant workers, if they fulfil the conditions laid down in the Bonded Labour System (Abolition)
Act, will be considered as bonded labour.
The main problem that is faced in the implementation of the 1976 Act is the identification of
bonded labourers. Neither the administrators at the district and tehsil levels admit the existence of
bonded labourers in their areas nor do the creditors accept that any bonded workers are serving
them, nor are the workers themselves willing to give statements that they are being forced to work
as bonded labourers since long. It is the social workers attached to non-political social action
groups and voluntary organisations who identify the bonded labourers. The other handicap which
aggravates the problem is the economic rehabilitation of the released labourers. The economic
rehabilitation includes: finding jobs for them, getting them minimum wages, giving them training
in arts and crafts, allotment of agricultural land, helping them in developing the allotted land,
helping them in the processing of forest produce, educating them and their children, arranging for
their medical care, etc. All these are Herculean tasks. Besides ensuring economic rehabilitation,
the state governments are also expected to arrange for their psychological rehabilition and
integration’of various schemes of central and state governments. In chalking out plans and strategies
of rehabilitation, the freed labourers are to be given the choice between various alternatives (Sharma,
1990:54).

When the, Constitution of India was framed, Article 23 was enshrined in it which
prohibited ‘traffic in human beings’, ‘begar’ and other similar forms of forced
labour.

Misery and Suffering in Bondage
One former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (Justice P.N. Bhagwati) described bonded labourers
as ‘non-beings, exiles of civilisation living a life worse than that of animals’, for the animals are at
least free to roam about as they like and they can plunder or garb food whenever they are hungry,
but these outcastes of society are held in bondage and robbed of their freedom even. They are
consigned to an existence where they have to live either in hovels or under the open sky and be
satisfied with whatever unwholesome food they can manage to get, inadequate though it may be
to fill their hungry stomachs. Not having any choice, they are driven by poverty and hunger into
a life of bondage, a dark bottomless pit from which, in a cruel exploitative society, they cannot
hope to be rescued (Yojana, May 1-15, 1987:32-33).
It is estimated that there are about 32 lakh bonded labourers in India. Of these, 98 per cent are said
to be bonded due to indebtedness and 2 per cent due to customary social obligations. The highest
number is believed to exist in three states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, followed
by Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. According to the figures released in May
1997 on the basis of a state government-sponsored survey (conducted as per the Supreme Court-
direction), Tamil Nadu has the maximum number of 24,000 bonded labourers, in the country,
engaged in 30 different occupations (The Hindustan Times, May 13, 1997). It has been pointed out
that the majority of bonded labourers work as agricultural labour in villages and belong to the
outcaste or tribal communities. Of the total labour force in the rural areas, about 33 per cent are
engaged in non-agricultural activities, 42 per cent work as cultivators, and 25 per cent as agricultural
labourers. Of those who work as agricultural labourers, 48 per cent belong to Scheduled Castes
and 33 per cent to Scheduled Tribes. Being unskilled and unorganised, agricultural labourers have
little for their livelihood other than personal labour. Bonded agricultural labourers occupy the
lowest rung of the rural ladder. Social and economic stratification in a village is linked with land
and caste which in turn govern economic and social status of the people. Bonded labourers thus
live in pitiable and miserable conditions. They are socially exploited because though in theory

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