In 2014, Riyaz borrowed Rs 1.2 lakh from a factory owner for the wedding of the eldest girl. For a couple of years after that, overwork was his only problem.

But a disruption in the silk supply caused the factory work to decline. Suddenly the unit would open for no more than a couple of days a week. The family had trouble finding other sources of income in Kolar town but leaving to look for work elsewhere was impossible. The conditions of the loan stipulated that it was the owner’s “advance” on Riyaz’s wages. This meant that he had to be in town to work on days the factory was open.

One day, an acquaintance from his home village brought him an opportunity at a silk-reeling factory in Sidlaghatta, around fifty kilometres away. His second daughter, also married by this time, lived there now, and the job promised better pay. Riyaz didn’t want to be separated from his family, but times were desperate. So he moved. From the new owner, he took an “advance” of Rs 1.5 lakh to pay off the previous owner and clear other debts.

In Sidlaghatta, most factories are located in the house of the owner. Riyaz lived with five other employees in small quarters within. For one year, he claims, he was paid around 200 rupees a day—his promised wages—and treated well. Then this factory too started to face problems with the supply of cocoons, and stopped work altogether. Riyaz could afford neither rent nor food, and the owner let him go back to Kolar.

He returned to Sidlaghatta a few months later when work began again. But things had changed at the factory. The economic distress persisted even though operations had resumed. The owner started withholding pay. Riyaz claimed that he was ill-treated and abused. He decided to run away, and stole back home.

A week later, an unknown car pulled up to his house. The men who spilled out barged inside, shouting and demanding Riyaz’s whereabouts. His youngest daughter, Aisha, who was home alone with her mentally disabled brother, couldn’t stop them from searching the house. “They went everywhere,” she said.

“They even searched the bathrooms to see if he was hiding there. When they couldn’t find him, they went and stood outside the house, waiting.” When Riyaz and Abida returned home, they dragged him to the car, pushed him inside and drove off.

‍ON A HOT day in February 2023, the large compound outside the sheds in the government cocoon market in Sidlaghatta in Chikkaballapur district was almost empty of people. The morning light shone ferociously on long lines of motorbikes belonging to those milling inside the shed, where line upon line of square green tables ran parallel to each other, symmetrically carving up the huge rectangular shed under a shiny metal roof. The tables were loaded with egg-shaped balls of golden yellow colour. Dozens of people milled about, checking the silk cocoons for quality, debating with themselves and discussing with others their plans for bids: which table to choose from, how much to put up. Periodically, they paused their scrutiny of the cocoons to check their mobile phones for the state of the bids online.

Outside, on a stone bench under the shadow of the trees directly facing the auction sheds, men sat chatting among themselves, their relaxed demeanour in marked contrast to the frenetic activity inside the buildings. They were silk factory owners, who’d already examined the lots and made their bids. As they chatted animatedly, their gazes hovered constantly over the screen of their smartphones, monitoring the state of the bids.

“The cocoons in the market here are sold for fifteen rupees  more than nearby markets,” Shafi Saiyyad, who sat at the centre of this group, said. “The silk produced here in Sidlaghatta is bought from the reelers by agents who take it around India to the weaving and manufacturing hubs of Dharmavaram, Kanchipuram, Hadripura, Salem, Surat and Bengaluru. The COVID-19 pandemic had thrown the silk market into distress. Business is picking up slowly now. However, compared to before, the volume of silk produced here has declined and so has the demand.”

Yet the price of cocoons had increased, Ijaz Ahmed, who sat next to Saiyyad, said. “Three years ago, the market started e-auctions. You have to get a reeler’s licence to use the app. Now, there is only e-auction. You can’t buy with cash.” In Sidlaghatta, mobile banking and online operations have long since become a way of life.

Half an hour before the auction began, the app showed frenzied activity as hundreds of reelers finalised their bids or dropped out. Ijaz was hoping for no-shows so that he’d be the highest bidder standing on at least one lot. If it turned out that he could buy an available lot, the money would transfer instantly out of his linked account to the cocoon market office.

This scene plays itself out every morning at the cocoon market of Sidlaghatta. The state of Karnataka produces thirty per cent of India’s raw silk, much of it in southern towns and districts like this one. It is part of a belt of districts where reeling, the process by which cocoons are converted to silk, is concentrated.

Sidlaghatta is a major local hub of the silk industry, but it is also like the hundreds of anonymous towns that dot the pleasant uplands of southern Karnataka in every respect, except for its curious claim to fame as the birthplace and childhood home of the Infosys chairman N R Narayana Murthy.

At the centre of Sidlaghatta’s economic nervous system stands the cocoon market from which all activities of the silk industry radiate outwards, giving employment to thousands and supporting the town’s small number of other commercial activities, including shopping establishments, restaurants, stores, construction and transport.

The activity at the cocoon shed presents one facet of the local silk industry: bustling, forward-looking and resilient despite the setbacks of lockdowns and downturns. But Sidlaghatta is also where hundreds of workers like Riyaz Khan must live and work against their will in an insidious form of wage enslavement. The nature of the bondage and the relations between employers—whom labourers call “owners”—and their debtors make it difficult to pin down the crime. Over a period of six weeks, I spoke to over a dozen bonded labourers in the silk industry in Sidlaghatta as well as to families who had been rescued from bonded labour. They confirmed what activists have long suspected but never conclusively established: bonded labour is endemic in the silk industry in India, and Karnataka, where 30 per cent of India’s raw silk comes from, is where a large number of these labourers are held.

‍THE WEEK FOLLOWING Riyaz’s abduction was a nightmare of anxiety and panic for Abida and Aisha. Days passed with no news of him and no way to contact him. Even though Abida went to the police to complain, they couldn’t discover what had happened to him. Then they received a call from the brother of the man who employed Riyaz. He said that he was calling from the Sidlaghatta police station: Riyaz had been arrested for theft. The caller also demanded that Abida and Aisha come to the factory and start working. “If you do anything against me, I will cut you into pieces and throw away your bodies,” he shouted over the line.

After his abduction, life became hellish for Riyaz. He was beaten by his owner (the English word is widely used among bonded labourers for their employers) and his owner’s brother. At the factory, they locked him up in a room. He was let out every morning for work, then locked up after hours.

Some days into this nightmare stint, a reeling machine Riyaz was working on sustained damage. That pushed the owner and his brother into a fury, he claimed. They beat him, then took him to the police station and complained that Riyaz had damaged the machine on purpose. This, Riyaz and his family claimed, prompted the police to register a case of theft against him. (To protect Riyaz’s identity as well as the identities of those aiding bonded labourers in Sidlaghatta, I did not request the local police for a copy of the First Information Report or related paperwork. The names of all the labourers interviewed for this story, as well as those of two non-governmental organisation workers, have been changed or withheld on request.)

Riyaz and his family claimed that the local police also beat him and ordered him to either pay the owner 1.5 lakh rupees or work in the factory until he had earned his way out. Riyaz was forced to agree. Worse, Aisha and Abida, under threat by the owner, also arrived at the Sidlaghatta factory. Now the whole family was in debt bondage.

“We were paid no salary during the time we were forced to work in the factory,” Aisha said. “We were only given rice to cook. Nothing else to eat. The owner’s brother would beat my father frequently.” Scant relief came from Aisha’s married sister in Sidlaghatta, who brought them vegetables and basic amenities once she got word of what had happened.

Even without physical restraints, Riyaz and his family were well and truly trapped. They were staring at an unknowable stretch of years of unpaid or irregularly paid forced labour and confinement, at the owner’s mercy. But they had better luck than many others, because a worker for an NGO was a frequent visitor to Aisha’s sister’s neighbourhood. (The NGO asked not to be named in this report.) He heard about Riyaz and his family, passed on his phone number to Aisha’s sister and asked her to get in touch.

When Aisha called and told them the story, this NGO approached the assistant commissioner’s office and filed a complaint of bonded labour against the factory owner. After an initial investigation, the AC’s office and the tehsildar’s office carried out an enquiry which confirmed that Riyaz and his family were being held captive.

Three months after Riyaz was kidnapped by the factory owner, Riyaz, Aisha and Abida were rescued by a party consisting of the police, assistant commissioner and activists against bonded labour. When the rescue party entered the factory, the owner and his brother bolted. They are still absconding.

‍ACCORDING TO A survey conducted in 2019 by Jeevika, an NGO that works to eradicate bonded labour in Karnataka, approximately 5,000 labourers work in the silk factories of Sidlaghatta, of whom 1,500 are under debt bondage. A significant number were born into families of bonded labourers, many going back several generations, said Balaraj, a Jeevika activist working in Sidlaghatta. A number of labourers I talked to, both men and women, said they had entered silk work as minors; some as young as eleven years old.

The debt cycle among bonded labourers in the silk industry begins with the “advance”, the initial loan a labourer takes from a factory owner, usually during a financial emergency. With no social safety net or formal or informal credit channels available, these loans are often the only option for workers. “What the prevalence of bonded labour points to is the complete absence of formal credit in the rural economy,” said  Jayati Ghosh, chairperson of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “This shows a complete failure on the part of the State. The Reserve Bank of India has issued a directive to both public and private banks to give loans of up to 1.5 lakh rupees to any individuals who apply. This is in addition to lending up to five lakh rupees to self-help groups without any collateral. However, the banks refuse to lend money to people.”

Families of bonded labourers in Sidlaghatta are hard put to make ends meet. Saving enough to pay back their loan is almost impossible. With each occasion that calls for a major expenditure, they resort to borrowing small amounts of money, sometimes as little as 10,000 rupees from owners. Unlike other forms of predatory lending, owners don’t charge interest.  Nonetheless, over time, some labourers end up owing twice the amount of advance they started with or even more.

Bonded labour is part of an economic system whose structural logic makes it self-perpetuating. Even assuming that labourers can persuade the owner to let them pay off the debt by working elsewhere, there are few jobs available in Sidlaghatta outside silk work, and most workers have no skill set other than silk reeling and threading. “Even if we change our current owner, we will still have to do silk work. What else can we do? We have been doing this our entire life, we know no other trade,” said Fatima, a bonded labourer who became a silk reeler when she was a minor.

The only way that these workers can escape is to transfer their bondage to another owner, who will purchase their debt by giving them an advance in his turn. Labourers find themselves able to switch workplaces only after years, usually in search of marginally higher wages. But it is the rare labourer who manages to pay off even a moderately large advance, and the servitude carries on.

THE MOBILE PHONE revolution, which made the digitisation of Sidlaghatta’s silk auctions possible, has been less dramatically transformative for the industry’s workers. Many families own just one phone for all their members. In Taslim’s house, the phone is usually with her husband, Rameez. After meeting her in Sidlaghatta, I called her several times to hear her story. Both Taslim and Rameez are bonded labourers in different silk factories. They are forced to work in these factories until they can pay back what they have borrowed from the factory owner. Taslim, who is in her mid-twenties, owes one lakh rupees to her owner. She wishes she could move to a factory that would pay her slightly more, but there is no way out of her current situation until she clears her debt. 

Silk-making requires a specialised set of skills at every stage of the process. Rameez’s family members have been working as silk workers for more than two generations, often taking loans from owners, trading their freedom for financial needs. Taslim, however, is unusual. Her father is a scrap metal dealer, and she learned the trade only after she got married.

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