Between jobs & slavery

Addressing informal employment is the key

As India prepares for the G20 leaders’ summit in New Delhi in September, the grand finale of its year as president of this group, a sobering reality comes in the form of the fifth edition of the Global Slavery Index. Published after a gap of five years — the last edition appeared in 2018 —it shows that some 50 million people live in modern slavery. India is home to about a fifth of this population at 11 million — the highest absolute number, though the country does not figure in the top 10 nations in terms of incidence of slavery per 1,000 people. But the issue could well be a concern of the G20 because these nations account for more than half the people living in modern slavery — and that includes such leading powers as China, Russia, and the US. These are concerning numbers, yet the matter does not figure in the issues delineated by the G20 Employment Working Group across the seven meetings on labour between February and June.

There have been valid objections to the methodology applied, principally that it is derived from a broad estimate partially based on a “risk score” that deploys the same factors used to determine whether a nation falls under the “developing” rubric. This automatically leaves the developed nations, mostly in Europe, with relatively benign scores, although the burgeoning African and West Asian refugee crisis, coupled with slowing economies, strongly suggests that modern slavery may be more prevalent than the surveys suggest. In the past, India had complained that the sample size of the surveys was skewed and the assumptions ignored the country’s unique socio-economic factors. Many quibble with the capacious definition of the Global Slavery Index, which follows no internationally accepted norm and is constantly recalibrated. Walk Free, the human rights organisation that compiles the index, includes child labour, sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and forced labour from forced marriage within the definition of modern slavery. Going by practices in South and West Asia alone, this is not such an irrational definition.

In India, the proximate term for slavery is bonded labour, which was outlawed in 1976. But it is narrowly defined as those working under obligation such as the repayment of a loan through unpaid service and having no freedom to escape the obligation. The Supreme Court added to the definition by including workers paid below prevailing market and legal minimum wages. Though the system exists mostly in rural areas, there is no definitive data — the government only reveals the numbers of those freed from bonded labour. But the reality is that 93 per cent of the country’s workforce falls in the unorganised sector, according to the Ministry of Labour and Employment. In that area, benefits and oversight against exploitation are non-existent. For many of them, there is a thin line of difference between slavery and employment. Efforts to bring them under the umbrella of benefits moved forward only in 2021, when the government introduced the e-Shram portal for unorganised sector workers to register and receive pensions, insurance, and death benefits. So far some 280 million informal workers, about half the workforce, have registered on the portal. This is good progress in two years. The real test, however, will lie in how easily retired informal workers can access these benefits.