Delhi/Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh
Rehana, her husband and children, from Purnia in Bihar, were labourers at a public toilet compound maintained by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi that had employed them through a contractor a year ago in Delhi’s Dwarka.
“My husband and I were lured with five thousand rupees by the contractor. We were promised a further thousand rupees a month,” Rehana began her story. “We were tricked into living on the site permanently. We worked all day. When I protested, our meagre wages were stopped and I was threatened with sexual violence,” she recalled. Even when she fell ill, she was not allowed to seek medical help. “The only saving grace is that I am finally free,” said Rehana. “Azaadi hai toh sab hai (Where there is freedom there is everything),” Rehana told Gaon Connection. But Rehana is still looking for work and knows there is always the danger that hunger and poverty may trap her into the miserable existence once again.
Migrant labourers’ lives are in tatters, more than it usually is, in the year of the pandemic as they continue to scramble for cash and food. As they do that, they are caught in a debt trap, often forcing them to end up as bonded labour.
Inevitably, women, underpaid and usually invisible and who form a significant chunk of India’s informal workforce, end up bearing the brunt, even after they have been rescued. The pandemic has only just increased their misery manifold.
Jyoti and her husband Jagdish, inhabitants of Damoh in Madhya Pradesh, now live in a makeshift camp in Loni Dehat, Uttar Pradesh, with their three children. They are working on a construction site to make ends meet. Their family was rescued a year ago, from another construction site in Noida. “I had to carry twelve bricks on my head at a time. I went hours and hours without a sip of water. I was abused verbally,” Jyoti recounted to Gaon Connection.
There were times 40-year-old Jyoti thought she would never come out alive from there. “We were beaten and constantly threatened. We had no access to food, water or accommodation,” she shuddered at the memory. “But one is willing to do anything for one’s children, isn’t it,” she said softly. While she is grateful they were rescued, she said there was still no money or compensation of any kind. “We are living in makeshift tents since,” she stated.
Pinki, originally from a village in Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, went to work over 230 kilometres away at a brick kiln in Nawanshahr in Punjab. “The only means for us to earn money was to move to the city. A contractor trapped us by offering money, fixed pay and decent work, and my entire family moved to work at the kiln,” the 45-year-old told Gaon Connection. Pinki worked round the clock carrying bricks on her back.
“It feels like a blur to me now, the life I lived for five years,” said Pinki, who was rescued in 2018 from the kiln and now works in Badhera Khas in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, 150 kilometres from the national capital, New Delhi. Pinki earns some money now running errands for farmers and collecting firewood, just so she and her family can stay off the streets. She said she found the work herself and not through a contractor.
But what has left Pinki permanently traumatised was not the brutal work, but the fact that her pre-teen children were taken away from her and sent to Himachal Pradesh to work. “I was not paid for my work, but losing my children pains me the most,” she said. Pinki has no idea what happened to her children. The contractor told her they were lost. When she was rescued, he ran away, and she fears they are dead.
Gaon Connection tried to get in touch with a few contractors with whom the rescued labourers had worked. However, they remained untraceable, as they often change numbers, to evade arrest.
Brick-walled
There is a vast network of contractors that supplies brick kilns across the country with labourers like Pinki. Across India, an estimated 12 million workers are employed in them, most of them coming from impoverished and remote rural pockets. The working hours are brutal, often ranging from 12 to 20 hours a day, the working conditions horrifying, often with no access to food, water or sanitation, and these labourers are easy targets of violence by both middlemen and kiln owners.
India identified at least 135,000 bonded workers in its 2011 census, while the Australian charity, Walk Free Foundation put the number at eight million in its 2018 Global Slavery Index.
A central government official from the labour commission, speaking on conditions of anonymity, said, “The rescue operations are a part of the preview of the state government. They are responsible for the logistics,” he declared.
Violence is common, he admitted, “But the state machinery is working to resolve it,” he assured Gaon Connection. He refused to comment on anything more on the matter.
According to anti-trafficking activists, when the lockdown was announced, those who were stuck on site at brick kilns, rice mills and construction sites were further exploited. “Amidst the pandemic, many were trapped in the sites of exploitation, as rescue operations remained stalled. As the nationwide lockdown was announced, brick kilns, several construction sites in remote parts of the country, including the agricultural sector continued to function,” Nirmal Gorana, National Campaign Committee for Eradication of Bonded Labour (NCCBL) responsible for conducting rescue operations across India, told Gaon Connection.
Though bonded labour was outlawed in 1976 when the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act came into force, the news of rescues are fairly common. Convictions, however, are few.
The Centrally Sponsored Plan Scheme for Rehabilitation of Bonded Labourers has been in place since 1978 to rehabilitate those rescued. As part of this scheme, adult male rescuees are entitled to the financial assistance of Rs 1 lakh, while those who come under special categories, such as women and children, are entitled to Rs 2 lakh. Others, who are rescued from forced or bonded labour from more extreme conditions like sexual exploitation, brothels, or trafficking, as deemed by the District Magistrate, are eligible for financial assistance of Rs 3 lakh along with some non-cash assistance from state governments.
This financial assistance is funded by the Centre, but comes only after conviction. A person who is rescued is eligible to Rs 20,000 as immediate assistance from the District Administration, regardless of conviction. Apart from the immediate assistance, those rescued are also entitled to a state-issued rescue certificate (RC), which makes them eligible for the rehabilitation measures; however, those getting the certificates remain abysmally low.
Rescued but not rehabilitated
When Pinki and Jyoti were rescued by NCCBL, they walked away with only their daily wages and nothing else. Their contractors were not booked either. Because they do not have the Rescue Certificate necessary to claim compensation, they have neither any money nor any other kind of assistance. For them, the relief of being rescued was a lot more than anything else.
According to Gorana, undertaking rescue operations became difficult during the pandemic. The meagre wages the bonded labourers were getting dried up. Even those who were rescued were not being given repatriation and police protection, making their chances of falling back in the trap of bonded labour much higher, he pointed out.
So, while Pinki, Jyoti, Rehana and other women like them breathe free for the time being, they are acutely aware that it is but a matter of time before they get sucked into the vicious vortex of bonded labour, abuse and misery once again.
Sumedha Pal is a recipient of the Sanjoy Ghose Media Awards 2020.
Charkha Features
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