Numerous news outlets and activist groups in India have reported an increase in trafficking, bonded labour, and slave-like working conditions in the past weeks. The two main stories were the rescue of young boys from a basement bangle factory in Rajasthan and Gujarat and the rescue of young girls from sex work and domestic servitude. Instead of seeing increases in trafficked and coerced labour as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown imposed in March, I suggest that it is located in a longer story of labour’s weakening position vis-a-vis their employers and the erosion of their existing rights. The pandemic and the lockdown did not create the conditions for the subjection of labour or for trafficking. They deepened existing asymmetries.
The popular view of the ‘India success story’ is that of sustained high growth rates on the one hand and record reductions in absolute poverty on the other. But in fact high growth was delivered on the backs on hyper-exploitation of ‘informal’ and ‘migrant’ labour, which has been “ground down by growth”. India has also relied heavily on the large-scale transfer of land ownership and the hyper-exploitation of nature. Successive governments have pursued the strategy of making ‘cheap land’ and ‘cheap nature’, along with ‘cheap labour’, available to capitalists, which has produced a steady stream of workers away from affected rural areas to the cities.
Factors other than the effects of economic policy also bear on the conditions of labour. Climate events leading to drought or flood, for example, have pushed people into hyper-exploitative labour relations and work conditions. The simple fact of too little or too much rain has helped fuel pockets of extreme deprivation – in Bihar, Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Uttar Pradesh in particular – which are the main sources of trafficking and coerced labour in India. Wage theft by employers, poor enforcement and understanding of rights, the presence of extremely coercive work conditions, violence with impunity against workers – all are endemic to this milieu.
