Set up task force to combat bonded labour: NHRC seminar

Revision of the Minimum Wages Act into a Living Wages Act and setting up of a national task force to examine the obstacles and challenges in combating the scourge of bonded labour, were among the various suggestions made by an NHRC-hosted national seminar here today.
The two-day event which was inaugurated by Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya yesterday at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library concluded with a host of suggestions made by members from various state commissions, legal experts and bonded labour activists and other eminent personalities.
"It was suggested that a national task force should be set up to examine the obstacles and challenges in the implementation of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 and subsequent schemes be introduced, as also to work further to eliminate bonded labour," a NHRC official said.

These suggestions would be further fine-tuned by the National Human Rights Commission before placing them as recommendation before the government.
Chairing the concluding session, Member, NHRC, justice (retd) D Murugesan said, "The Commission would further deliberate upon all such important suggestions and finalise its recommendations to the government for implementation towards prevention and elimination of bonded labour in the country".
Other important suggestions included revision of "Minimum Wages Act of 1948 and into Living Wages Act by bring at par the minimum wages of a skilled labourer with the lowest paid employee of the central government as per the 7th Pay Commission," the NHRC said.

Experts at the seminar also felt that "most of the bonded labourers belong to the Scheduled Castes and Schedule Tribes communities and the official statistics do not match the ground realities of bonded labour, which continues to manifest not only in the agricultural sector but also in any sector of employment, including brick-kilns, stone quarries, salt fields, leather manufacturing units, brothels, massage parlours, placement agencies or trafficking and so on".

Bringing uniformity in the rescue, release and rehabilitation process of bonded labourers and ensuring they happen simultaneously by giving powers to the DMs to release immediately funds from a dedicated corpus as an emergency to avoid delay and inconvenience to the beneficiaries was another suggestion.

"All financial transactions in this process should be digitised," it said.
Roping in the corporate sector as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives and civil society to provide vocational training at district level to the rescued bonded labourers to ensure their employment was another suggestion.
"Vigilance Committees in all districts should be made fully functional and NGOs as well as labour inspectors should be made part of it," it added.