Despite the efforts of the government, bonded labour still continues in India. Discuss.

Why the Act does not empty the field

Bondage in India is typically an advance (peshgi) that ties a worker or a family to a contractor (sardar, thekedar) for a season or years. Caste organises who can be tied: Dalit and Adivasi households, and some extremely backward peasant groups, enter kilns and fields with fewer exit options. Jan Breman described neo-bondage: not a lifelong serf on one master’s land, but a renewable unfreedom through labour-market intermediaries. Child labour and women’s unpaid help on the same site deepen the tie.

Government efforts—surveys, release certificates, NHRC orders, Central Sector Scheme for rehabilitation—assume a detectable master-servant pair. Contract chains, interstate migration, and cashless advances hide that pair. Employers call workers ‘free’ because they may leave after the season; leaving without clearing the advance is not free. Panchayats and local police often share the employer’s class or caste world. Rescue without land, credit or a job produces re-bondage.

Sectors and the wider economy

Agriculture after land reform still uses attached labour in pockets. Construction and kilns around cities feed on seasonal Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan streams. The informalisation noted in industrial class structure is the same story: the organised citadel outsources risk to a bonded margin. Trafficking and the Juvenile Justice and child labour laws overlap this field; they have not closed it.

Continuance therefore sits at the junction of caste, credit, migration and informal capitalism. The Act remains necessary. It is not sufficient without cheap rural credit, enforceable minimum wages, contractor licensing that works, and rehabilitation that includes housing and work rather than a one-time stipend.