India’s children of bonded laborers fight to rescue others

They are not easy to spot. Working in vegetable patches and on millet fields in India’s southern state of Karnataka, farm laborers caught in debt bondage suffer mainly in silence.
But Gopal V has lived with this silence for long enough. Now 44, the son of bonded laborers is on a mission to identify workers trapped in debt bondage — and to make sure they get justice.
“My parents worked endless hours not for money, just food,” Gopal said. “They worked for a landlord in my village, whose house I still can’t enter. He paid them back with a little food, and my father died in bondage.”
Now, he travels across villages around Anekal, near the city of Bengaluru, looking for people like his parents.
There is an urgency to his search, he says, because he wants to “get them out before they die.”
India banned the practice of bonded labor in 1976, but the country is still home to 11.7 million bonded laborers, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). The laborers may be working to pay off a loan from their employer, or a debt inherited from a relative.
Jeevika, a non-profit organization that works to eradicate bonded labor in the southern state, said it identified 12,811 bonded laborers in Karnataka between 2012 and 2015. Most of them are still waiting for state authorities to give them release certificates and compensation money, it said.
Its founder, Kiran Kamal Prasad, estimates that there are up to 200,000 bonded laborers across Karnataka.
“It is a perennial problem that persists in the agriculture sector,” said Druthi Lakshmi of the state’s rural development department.
“We know they are really poor, illiterate people who often go back to the same landlord for work after they are rescued because the rehabilitation money is not enough.”
The government is in the process of undertaking a more comprehensive survey to identify people in bondage, she added.
Gopal and others like him who work in partnership with Jeevika use their childhood memories of suffering and debt bondage to encourage others to find a way out of it.
“The fear of the landlord still exists in our (lower-caste) Dalit communities and people refuse to acknowledge they are in bondage,” said Ramakrishna V, also the son of a bonded laborer.
“It takes a lot of talking before they break down and admit they are paying off a loan they took many, many years ago,” said Ramakrisha, now a lawyer fighting for workers’ rights in court.
Activists say most people trapped in bonded labor are unaware of the fact they might have paid off their initial loan 10 times over. In addition, the 1976 Abolition of Bonded Labour Act cancels any dues that may be pending when a worker is rescued from bondage, they said.

Source: Arab News