Orphaned after birth in a village outside Kolar in southern Karnataka, he’d moved to the town when he married Abida. Both worked in local factories, reeling silk for a living while bringing up three girls as well as a son with a mental disability. 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.

Taslim, the eldest of four sisters, was born in a village in the Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh. She was sent to live with her grandmother in Bengaluru, and studied until the eleventh standard, or first-year pre-university, in the city. “I would have liked to continue studying,” she said. “But it was not possible. We didn’t have the money.” She went back home. When she returned to Karnataka, it was to Sidlaghatta as Rameez’s bride.

For the first two years, Rameez’s income supported them, and Taslim took care of the housework. Then they faced a financial crunch, and she had to join a silk unit. For an “advance” of one lakh rupees, she agreed to work there until the money was paid back.

In the silk factories, silkworm cocoons bought at auctions are first “cooked”: that is, they are kept in near-boiling water, killing the larvae inside. After the larvae are removed, the reeling process begins. Taslim picks the silk filaments from several cocoons and binds them together into a single thread, which is then wound on a fast-moving circular reel. It took her three months to learn to do the work properly. “At first my hands used to hurt when soaking the cocoons in the hot water,” she said. “But soon I got used to it.”

Silk-reeling is difficult and unpleasant work. The worker is constantly exposed to heat. The skin on her hands is likely to get disfigured from always being submerged in hot water, and she has to crouch in the same position for several hours. For bonded labourers, close confinement and surveillance makes the situation worse. But Taslim and Rameez were able to hold on to a rented house of their own, and Taslim has relative freedom from the owner’s demands compared to many other bonded labourers.

Yet, she is effectively bound to Sidlaghatta and the factory, able to leave only for very short periods of time. Marriages, funerals, births in the family, the social occasions that make up life for most people, are closed off to Taslim. Her parents’ home in Rayalaseema is only a few hours away by bus, but she is lucky if she can see them once every few months. To make the visit, she must take a bus after work ends on Saturday evening and get there early on Sunday morning. After snatching a few hours with her parents, she has to be on a bus back to Sidlaghatta by the afternoon, ready to turn up for work on Monday morning.

Sundays are holidays in silk factories across Sidlaghatta. Taslim must work ten hours, six days a week, and cannot leave work for more than two days for any reason, including illness. “Any more than a day or two off once in a while, and the owner gets angry,” she says. “He will ask us to give his money back and leave, and say that if we are not able to do that, we should be working.” Rameez told me that labourers who hadn’t taken advances found themselves far less at the mercy of owners’ whims and fancies. 

The minimum legal wage for silk reeling fixed by the Karnataka government in 2017 was Rs 389.55 per day. Early in 2023, it was raised to 511 rupees. As of early 2023, Taslim was paid 220 rupees per day. She now has a one-year-old child, and the family’s expenses will only rise. But neither she nor Rameez have the time to look for additional sources of income. They own no assets other than some family ornaments. “We are not able to save anything to pay back the advance,” she said. “If we need money for any emergency, we have to approach the owners. Most labourers who have taken advances end up borrowing more money for wedding and festival celebrations or when someone in the family falls sick.”

Late last year, Taslim hadn’t asked for additional “advance” from the owner, but she worried about the winter months when silk factories became idle because of the drastic drop in the quality of silk cocoons. It meant that work would become irregular and sometimes dry up altogether. Amidst financial desperation, many labourers take further loans from the owners, increasing the burden of the debt that ties them to the workplace.

“Generally, my owner behaves well as long as we do our work well,” she said. “But if we make a mistake, he gets angry. During the winter months, the quality of the cocoons goes down. The cold weather is not good for the worms, and the silk we get after reeling is often uneven or may have breaks. My owner  then blames us and abuses us in foul language. We cannot say anything back.” Taslim added that most owners were not bad. “But there are a few that are quite horrible. They beat their workers,” she said.

ALMOST ALL THE bonded labourers interviewed for this story were paid between 200 rupees and 230 rupees for a day’s work, less than half the minimum wage. Free labourers received between 250 rupees and 270 rupees. Many labourers reported overtime work of two to three hours a day, with the same pay as for normal time. A few said they were not paid at all for the overtime. The Indian Factories Act 1948 mandates that any overtime work over nine hours a day should be paid at double the regular rate. Factory owners and managers violating the Act are liable for imprisonment of up to two years and a fine of two lakh rupees. But the lack of factory inspections by understaffed labour offices ensures that these laws are rarely implemented.

All the interviewees pointed to the physical restrictions imposed by owners from whom they’d borrowed their advance as the worst of the violations. Their holidays were severely restricted, with no permission to travel even to mourn a death in the family or to celebrate a wedding. If workers dropped out for more than two days, owners put pressure on them to re-join immediately, frequently subjecting them to verbal and sometimes physical abuse during these exchanges.

Millions of people in India are trapped in debt bondage in a variety of sectors like brick kilns, textile and garment factories, cotton production, agriculture, mining, quarries, domestic work and the silk industry. In each industry, local patterns of migration, social discrimination and economic structure underwrite the oppression of the workers. A majority of bonded labourers come from Dalit, Adivasi and other marginalised communities. According to data from the Ministry of Labour and Employment, nineteen states have identified the prevalence of bonded labour within their borders. Over the decades, the Indian government has rescued around three lakh bonded labourers, of whom over 63,000 are from Karnataka.

There are few estimates for the actual number of bonded labourers in India, and they vary widely. In 2018, the Global Slavery Index estimated that 8.3 million Indians work as bonded labourers on a given day.

But even this figure could be an underestimation. In 1995, the Tamil Nadu Commissioners’ report ordered by the Supreme Court stated that there were a million cases of bonded labour in Tamil Nadu alone. A study of bonded labour published in the Journal of Human Trafficking in 2018 estimated a labourer population of 16,70,734 in the three districts it targeted: Bengaluru Urban, Bengaluru Rural and Ramnagara. “Based on the marketplace study results, 33.4 per cent of labourers were bonded, translating to an extrapolated 5,58,334 bonded labourers in the three districts,” the authors wrote. “In addition, 41.8 per cent of inter-state migrant labourers were bonded in comparison to 31 per cent of intra-state migrants and 19.8 per cent of non-migrants.”

I FIRST MET Mansoor in the late evening, as the light was dying out, on a bylane leading to a local college. He and his extended family lived in houses within the factory compound. Mansoor and his two brothers are bonded labourers working as silk reelers. Mansoor was scared that his owner, or the owner’s acquaintances, might spot him talking to me so we moved to a better concealed place at the back of a small tea stall closed for the day. Shielded from the road by the stall’s façade and the semi-darkness, Mansoor felt safe enough to start talking.

I had heard from a reliable source that Mansoor had been trying to get out of his bonded work but his owner would not let him. He had also told me there was a very bad confrontation with the owner, which could have turned physical. Even behind the shadows that hid him from the eyes of those passing by, there was an undercurrent of nervousness, almost fear, running through him. Though just 28, he looked like a much older man. Dressed in a green shirt, Mansoor had a huge physique; almost a giant of a man, with close-cropped hair and a body so bulky that his neck had all but disappeared. Yet there was something gentle, almost boyish, about his demeanour.

Mansoor was born into a family of labourers. He and his brothers did odd jobs as they grew up, including working in silk factories. Theirs was always a life of financial insecurity but they managed not to fall into the debt trap, and one brother started running a small roadside shop. In 2016, married and with two small daughters, Mansoor aspired for a little more. He started a readymade garment shop in Sidlaghatta with an initial investment of six lakh rupees. The three brothers pooled in the money, and Mansoor ran the shop. He bought garments from a nearby town. When he wanted larger volumes, he’d buy in Chickpet, an area in Bengaluru known for its wholesale garment shops, and bring them back to Sidlaghatta by lorry.

The one material he wouldn’t sell was silk. “No one will buy silk clothes here. It’s too expensive,” he said.

By the time his first child was in school, the profit margins were tidy and Mansoor began to believe he could provide a stable life for his little family. But then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and the country went into lockdown.

“It ruined us,” he said. “I know we couldn’t go out because we were putting others at risk, but it was a really difficult situation. I’d bought sarees and other garments worth three lakh rupees on credit, but now I could not sell anything. The creditors kept calling me to get their money back.”

Desperate for cash, Mansoor said he was cheated by some people who approached him and offered to sell his merchandise for a commission. “I had no other option,” he said. “But most of them just disappeared with the stuff. I lost merchandise worth three lakhs and also had to pay my creditors in Bangalore.” His landlord in Sidlaghatta refused to give him a break on the rent for the shop. Before long, it was getting hard to put food on the table every day.

‍

Mansoor and his brother sold the family’s jewellery to meet the debt. Unable to pay rent, he had to close the shop. When everything was done, he still owed 30,000 rupees. His brother’s roadside shop had long since closed, and the family desperately needed a source of income. A year into the pandemic, the three brothers approached a silk factory owner and took advances of one lakh rupees to two lakh rupees each.

“I felt like I was selling myself,” Mansoor recalled with visible emotion. “I want to leave and start a garment shop again one day. But the owner won’t let me go unless I pay him back the full amount. But that is not possible because I am not able to save anything.” He’s now paid 220 rupees a day.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) found that reports of forced labour were widespread during the initial months of pandemic-enforced lockdowns. A report published by the ILO with Walk Free and the International Organisation for Migration states that, around the world, “disruptions to income because of the pandemic led to greater indebtedness among workers, and with it reports of a rise in debt bondage among some workers lacking access to formal credit channels”

Mansoor was reluctant to talk about what, if anything, transpired with his owner recently. Sometime during our conversation, he had caught a glimpse of his owner’s cousin at the corner of the road. The idea that word might get back to the owner spooked him. He also did not trust me enough to know if I would protect his anonymity. As he left, he told me cryptically, “See, it is not that I am not afraid of anyone. And if what you write helps others like me, it is good. But be sure to write it carefully. Yeh Sidlaghatta hai. Yahan kisi ka dimaag ghoom gaya to kuch bhi ho sakta hai. (This is Sidlaghatta, and if someone gets the wrong idea here, they can do anything.)”

It took me three weeks to persuade Mansoor to meet me again. This time, we met outside the bus stand and proceeded towards the railway station. Not many trains stop at Sidlaghatta railway station. It was just after ten and the crowd was thin. Mansoor walked until we were close to the end of the platform, with no one nearby. There was a brief silence as we settled down on the concrete bench. Then Mansoor pointed to the other side of the railway tracks. “That side of the town, it is mostly Hindus who live there. On this side, we have mostly Muslims. Both work in silk, but Muslims are more,” he said.

After a further pause, he continued. “I will tell you the whole story,” he said. “I have been trying for several months to get out of factory work. My owner told me that if I can repay the complete amount, I can leave. I said I would pay it back in instalments, but he wanted the full amount in one go. That way, he can lend it to someone else who’s vulnerable like me, getting an immediate replacement.”

Mansoor’s owner gave him two months to come up with two lakh rupees. Because his wife and children had moved into the factory complex, Mansoor was free to work wherever he wanted to: the owner could be sure that he would return. “I tried different things,” Mansoor said. “I tried to borrow from everyone with whom I had some connection. But everyone would think: will he pay back the money? I tried jobs of various kinds. I did construction jobs that pay 700 rupees to 800 rupees a day. But there is not a lot of construction happening in Sidlaghatta, and the work was irregular. I went to Bangalore and worked as a salesman in a shop for some time.” Mansoor was paid 400 rupees per day at the shop, and found he could save a little, though nowhere near enough to make two lakh rupees in a short time. He tried to secure money from the owner of the shop, reasoning that he was happy to work there and promising the owner that he would readily pay him back out of his earnings. The shop owner was not interested in the proposition.

Mansoor returned to Sidlaghatta at the end of two months. He’d managed to borrow a total of 50,000 rupees from some relatives. He went to the owner and tried to negotiate his release on the basis of this partial payment. But the conversation went badly and turned into an argument. Then things got out of hand, and the enraged owner started beating Mansoor. He did not put up any resistance.

“They are rich people. And they would have many connections,” Mansoor said. The owner dragged Mansoor into a room in his house and locked the door. He told Mansoor that he would not let him go till he returned the advance. The owner had no intention of giving him more than a meal a day though Mansoor’s family brought him food, which the owner passed on into the room. For two days, Mansoor stayed locked in, with no signs of being let go.

But they hadn’t confiscated his mobile phone, and luckily, Mansoor was able to get through to the only person he thought might be able to help: his friend, Krishnakanth, who was his schoolmate and now worked for a local NGO.

Krishnakanth turned up at the factory the next morning. He said he found Mansoor beaten up “pretty badly”. He went to the owner. “I told him that I would complain to the police and that he would be arrested for keeping a bonded labourer. His factory would be closed. He agreed to let Mansoor go so long as he agreed to continue working there.”

Since then, Mansoor has continued to work at the factory, though Krishnakanth has been pressing him to file a complaint of bonded labour at the assistant commissioner’s office. Mansoor is categorically against the idea. “If I take money from this man and then get him arrested, who will ever employ me?” he said. “I will not be able to survive.”

“WHEN PEOPLE THINK of bonded labour, they think of people who are chained or locked up in factories. But often the reality is different. The situation is more normal and also insidious,” said Bhaskar Simha, who used to work on bonded labour in the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Department (RDPR) in Karnataka. The RDPR is the nodal department in Karnataka for the identification, rescue and rehabilitation of bonded labourers.

It’s easy to see how, for a variety of reasons, the pattern of silk labour in Sidlaghatta resembles that of free labour, and this may explain why bonded labour in silk has remained largely invisible. Silk factory owners can appear like paternalistic benefactors aiding workers when they need money, and the relationship between labourers and employers can appear symbiotic rather than oppressive except for the occasionally violent owner. In a town that survives on the silk industry, there is a predisposition to view the system in such a positive light.

Industries like brick kilns, mining and quarrying require a large workforce, and business owners use aggravated force to control the workers. The majority of bonded labourers in these industries are migrant workers trafficked by agents. In some parts of India, working hours in brick kilns and garment factories average between twelve and sixteen. Sundays are technically holidays but workers are frequently called in. Owners use hired muscle to enforce rules and to make sure no one escapes. Beatings are common, and women workers have often reported instances of sexual abuse. In many of these sectors, owners charge interest on advance wages. Many labourers rescued from brick kilns report that they were in effect enslaved for life, as the original advance accrued to large amounts. Many labourers were not paid anything.

Life in Sidlaghatta’s silk units is easier in some ways. Here, labourers work an average of nine to ten hours a day, with overtime of two or three hours. Unlike most other industries with a high incidence of bonded labour, the majority of workers in the silk industry are natives of the town or nearby areas rather than migrants. (A smaller section are interstate migrants.) Muslims dominate both the labour force and the business class, though there are a large number of Hindus among both workers and employees.

Unusually for bonded labourers, they typically work alongside and mix with free labour in the factories. As locals with community ties, the workers are protected from the most extreme violations, and there is some trust that local state actors, such as bureaucrats and the police, will be hesitant to cover up truly egregious cases.

Most owners don’t use any obvious force or coercion to retain bonded labourers at the factory, and labourers seek advances voluntarily. The silk factories of Sidlaghatta employ anywhere between three and twenty labourers, and owners are usually not rich enough to hire henchmen. Often, members of the owner’s family also work side by side with the labourers.

Despite these significant deviations, the conditions of bondage persist in Sidlaghatta. The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 of India defines bonded labour as “the system of forced labour under which a debtor enters into an agreement with the creditor that he would render service to him either by himself or through any member of his family or any person dependent on him, for a specified or unspecified period, either without wages or for nominal wages, in consideration of loan or any other economic consideration obtained by him or any of his ascendants.”

Bonded labour violates the worker’s fundamental right to work and life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. In the case of the silk labourers of Sidlaghatta, the social pressure and implied threat of force from the owners is what makes the nature of their work bonded labour. They cannot leave their workplaces and they cannot stop working, irrespective of their wishes or their financial condition. The owner has the right to ask for his money back like any other lender, but once he insists that they work for him till the money is paid back, it becomes an illegal act.

Even though an owner may not charge interest on his advance, the bonded labour system in silk is economically exploitative. “It is not correct to say that the owners don’t [levy] interest,” Jayati Ghosh explained. “They are paying the bonded labourers below the market rate for free labourers. It is effectively an interest rate on the principal. The market rate for labour is depressed because of bonded labour. In an economy where there is bonded labour, it is harder for other workers to bargain for higher wages.”

According to the labourers interviewed for the story, in Sidlaghatta as well as other silk production centres like Ramnagara and Kolar, there is a widespread social agreement that if the owner lends money, it is the moral obligation of the worker to return the money by keeping his or her word and working it off. To an extent, even bonded labourers share the sentiment. “We have taken the money. We have to pay it back,” said Rameez when asked why so few labourers complained to the police about bonded labour through NGOs like Jeevika. Many labourers expressed similar sentiments when I

talked to them. Within the moral ecosystem of semi-rural towns, the exchange of compulsory labour for a loan is perceived as a fair quid pro quo. “It is only in cases of extreme use of coercion that NGOs come across a case in the silk industry where the labourer is driven to make a complaint, and they can be rescued,” said a senior official of an NGO working on bonded labour.

ACCORDING TO THE Bonded Labour Act, state governments must set up bonded labour vigilance committees in every district and sub-district, headed by the district collector and assistant collector respectively. The committees are tasked with identifying incidents of bonded labour, rescuing the workers and rehabilitating them. But it is almost always NGOs that initiate this process.      

“In practice, bonded labourers are often identified by grass-roots civil society organisations,” according to a joint report by Anti-Slavery, Volunteers for Social Justice, Domestic Workers Association and Jan Jagriti Samiti. “Often such civil society organisations must lobby for the district administration to conduct an inquiry. Even when they do, in most cases the district administration claims that there is no case of bonded labour. Civil society organisations then have to legally challenge the finding, and push to ensure that the workers are recognised as being bonded, and are given an official release certificate. This process can take eighteen months or longer.”

In Sidlaghatta, the sub-district bonded labour vigilance committee is tasked with identifying bonded labour and is headed by the assistant commissioner. Hemalatha, the concerned official at the assistant commissioner’s office in Sidlaghatta, told me that eleven labourers from the silk industry have been given release certificates since 2016. According to local NGOs and news reports, at least twenty to thirty labourers have been rescued from bonded labour from the silk industry in Sidlaghatta over the same period.

Kiran Kamal Prasad, the chief coordinator of the anti-bonded labour NGO Jeevika, accused the local administration of being apathetic and inefficient. Jeevika has filed dozens of complaints of bonded labour in the silk industry. While some labourers have been granted release certificates, in the majority of cases the enquiry is pending or the Sidlaghatta administration concluded that bonded labour did not exist.

The district vigilance committee has ten members, and is headed by the district commissioner. The sub-district committee headed by the assistant commissioner has ten other members, one of whom is a representative of the district administration. Otherwise, both committees are identical in composition, and include three members from NGOs and two Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe representatives among others.

“All the non-official members of these committees are selected because they are close to officialdom,” Kiran Kamal Prasad explained. “The social activists are from NGOs working in other fields. They may know about education or deprivation and other issues, but they do not know anything about bonded labour. The Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe members are not selected because of involvement in the movements,”—for Dalit and Adivasi rights—”but because they are people known to the administration. At the meetings of the committees, usually nothing gets done, except when a rare member may flag an issue about bonded labour.”

In addition to vigilance committees, the Karnataka government has constituted task forces at the taluk level—more local than the sub-district level—to identify bonded labour. This taskforce is headed by the taluk’s tehsildar, its highest administrative official, and has four other officials as members.

I spoke to Ram Prasad, the case officer for bonded labour in the Sidlaghatta taluk office. He said, “The cases of bonded labour filed against the owners are mostly fake. I know a case where a lady took money from a silk factory owner and filed a case of bonded labour just to get the compensation. Now she has made money and the owner is in trouble.”

Then tehsildar B S Rajeev put the issue more broadly. “What is bonded labour?” he said. “You tell me. If you give advance, is it bonded labour? How can that be? Just because someone lends someone money, can it become bonded labour? Is it logical? You live in Bengaluru, right? If you stay in a rented house, you will give advance to the owner. Does that make it bonded labour?” (Rajeev has since been transferred, and Sidlaghatta has a new tehsildar.)

Rent, subject to agreements that protect both landlords and tenants, is nothing like the advance system on wages in Sidlaghatta. But this kind of characterisation of the nature of bonded labour and the Bonded Labour Act, and inability or unwillingness to take bonded labour seriously, prevailed among local officials I spoke to. The general idea that it is morally necessary to repay debt through work, and the view of owners as paternalistic benefactors, was entrenched in the local administration. The attitude severely affects the government’s efforts to combat bonded labour. Lending to a worker is not a crime as long as the worker’s labour is given voluntarily to the lender’s factory. It becomes bonded labour when the lender coerces, threatens or uses violence to force a labourer to continue to work without their consent—when he becomes, in other words, the “owner”.

S Radhakrishnan, a lawyer who specialises in labour law in the High Court of Kerala said, “Prima facie, giving an advance is not bonded labour under the Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act, in my opinion.” He told me that the act criminalised the grant of an advance only if it was followed by no payment or nominal payment of wages—something that did not apply in Sidlaghatta, where pay, even if below minimum wage standards, is real and more than nominal. “It becomes a crime under the Act if the owner prevents the labourer from leaving the place of work. The owner cannot do that,” he explained. “If he wants to recover his money, he has to do it legally by approaching a civil court.”

Priyanka Mary Francis, commissioner of Panchayat Raj in the RDPR department, agreed that the local administration lacked a proper understanding of the problem. “There is a need for training about bonded labour at the level of the local administration,” she said. “We have done some training. While there are not many cases of bonded labour reported from the silk industry, we are aware of the problem. We have sent a letter to the CEOs and commissioners of the sericulture department to enquire into the incidence of bonded labour in the silk industry. We are waiting for the response. We have announced 9 February as anti-Bonded Labour Day. After the elections in the state are over, we intend to initiate new measures against bonded labour.” (As of writing this, no new measures have been put in place.)

Bhaskar Simha, who worked as a researcher and coordinator of the Bonded Labour Act from 2019 to 2020 in the RDPR department, was much more scathing about the role of the public officials. He said three factors were mainly responsible for the lack of action by public officials: their lack of knowledge about bonded labour, the political connections of owners accused of bonded labour, and caste bias in how upper-caste public officials understand the condition of bonded labourers who mainly belong to SC/ST. “Tehsildars and other local officials deny the issue of forced labour. They don’t know the ABC of bonded labour. The awareness of the public officials is very low despite training,” he said. “Part of the reason is caste bias. The employers adopt a method by which they can get cheap labour and then claim they are only trying to help the poor labourer. The public officials then say of the labourers: ‘They have nothing else to do, they are complaining because they want  money etc.’ The officials also don’t want to go against local industrialists who are powerful. There is fear to some extent, and they also cooperate to be on good terms with the industrialists. The attitude is ‘Why put the poor fellow in jail?’”

Simha believes that there needs to be a procedural overhaul to ensure that local officials’ apathy and biases do not impede enquiries into complaints of bonded labour. “When conducting an enquiry, they will make baseless allegations against civil society”—the NGOs which bring the complaint—“and the workers themselves. The RDPR department should issue guidelines for the officials to explain why the allegations of bonded labour are not true. It is not enough to say no, there is no bonded labour. You should provide reasons why the complaint is found to be untrue. There should be a procedure.”

Epilogue

For the last four years, Riyaz and his family have been living at their home in Kolar. On being rescued, Riyaz, Abida and Aisha received 44,000 rupees each as compensation. Using that money, Riyaz bought a cow. Now he makes his living selling milk and doing agricultural labour. Aisha is now married,and the family is no longer in financial trouble. Nonetheless, they still live in fear of the owner and his men. It is known among silk owners in Kolar that Riyaz tried to get one of them arrested. The interviews with Riyaz, Abida and Aisha were done over the phone from Bengaluru, because there was fear that a journalist visiting Riyaz’s house could draw the attention of local owners. Riyaz and his family have managed to escape the hell of bonded labour, but its shadow still looms over them.

In Sidlaghatta, Mansoor now works Sundays at a construction site to make more money and start paying back his advance. He gets paid 800 rupees a day, but he knows the work will not always be available. I ask him whether he would let his children enter the same trade when they grow up. “No,” he said. “I will support their education for as long as they want to study. Hamari zindagi aise hi chali gayi”—my life has passed me by. “I don’t want the same for them.”

“I really tried to make money, pay off the debt and become free,” he added. “But I couldn’t do it. I will keep trying. I am like our freedom fighters. I am working for my freedom. One day, I too will be azad.”