Labour pain

Modern slavery in India remains stubbornly high

A notable sign of the long-term structural weaknesses of India’s economic reform has been the inability to meaningfully expand the market for jobs in sync with its demographic growth, which sees 1 million young people join the workforce each month. One disturbing indicator of this serial failure of governance has been India’s consistent high ranking in the annual Global Slavery Index published by the Australia-based human rights group Walk Free Foundation. Though the prolonged global slowdown has seen a distressing rise in the global incidence of modern slavery – from an estimated 30 million in 2013 to 46 million in 2016 – India continues to hold its ignominious leadership position in terms of absolute numbers. In 2016, it was deemed to have some 18.3 million people trapped in slavery, nearly 40 per cent of the global total, up from 14 million in 2013. 

Policy-makers may discount the ranking as a function of the size of the population. But two things stand out in this context. First, India added many more people to the ranks of modern slaves than did China, the world’s most populous country. Though the Middle Kingdom weighs in at number two in terms of absolute numbers, it sent less than a million people into slavery between 2013 (2.9 million) and 2016 (3.3 million), a reflection of the depth and resilience of its reforms even as economic growth slowed. Second, and perhaps the more significant aspect of the survey, is that in terms of estimated percentage of population, India ranks number four with 1.4 per cent of its people labouring under coercive conditions of employment with no exit route against China at a distant 40 (though in that country’s mammoth global supply chains, the distinction between slavery and wage labour is often a fine one). On this more relevant parameter, India shares the company of North Korea (ranked first), Uzbekistan (second), Cambodia (third) and Qatar (fifth). Indeed, if the large cohorts of Indian migrant labour in the last mentioned jurisdiction were included in India’s numbers, the country could end up leading the rankings on this parameter as well, since it is from the stellar non-job creating states of Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar that the tiny West Asian kingdom – ironically, one of the world’s richest countries – draws the labour to build its glittering skyscrapers. 

The addition of 4 million slaves in three years in India is doubly disturbing because this expansion also points to the rank failure of India’s law enforcement institutions. Unlike its companions on the top five list, India has laws in place to discourage such practices. Where Uzbekistan has an extraordinary state-sponsored programme drafting children into the annual cotton harvest, for instance, India outlawed bonded labour in the late seventies and has progressively tightened laws against human trafficking, prostitution and forced marriage. Yet, many of these new-age slaves are women and children, the most vulnerable sections on the frontline of economic slowdown and poverty. And, with a UNDP study predicting that India will see a severe job shortage in the next 35 years, the number of the country’s modern slaves is likely to boom.