This cycle has been going on in India for the past fifteen hundred years. Debt bondage has coexisted with formal slavery in India. In 1843, The British abolished slavery in the Anti Slavery Act in India. As the slaves had no knowledge of any other skill, they traded their status to bonded servants. This is due to the fact that the British didn’t abolish bondage servitude and thus it still remains today.
The poor rural Indians have very few options to borrow money. If they do have a bank in close proximity, they rarely qualify to be able to get loans as they don’t have any security or collateral to offer thus they go to other sources. These other sources are the local moneylenders, bond masters, landlords or local employers in the town. They charge up to twenty percent interest monthly or even more. The rural Indians find themselves borrowing money and not being able to pay it back due to the fact of the high interest rates. Hence, they are forced to give their children up for debt bondage to obtain the money to repay the loan, which is highly unsuccessful most of the time.
The industry in which I focused most of my research on is the Beedi Industry in India. Beedi is a cigarette produced and consumed in India. It is cheaper than regular filter tipped cigarettes; however, it is an expensive product costing ten to twenty rupees for a twenty-four pack. It is heavily consumed in India and throughout the world with more than five hundred billion rupees produced and smoked. Annual sales tower over forty billion rupees per year and is one of India’s biggest domestic industries.
Beedi rolling is long, tedious and stationary work. The children in the factories sit crossed legged on the ground all day, with a basket in their laps. The basket holds all the materials needed to roll these non-filtered cigarettes, which includes the tobacco and the rolling papers, which come from the large leaves of the Tendu plant. The children take the rolling paper, sprinkles tobacco in it, roll it, and then hands it off to a younger child who closes the tips. The younger children start off as tip closers and works his or her way up to a roller.
The pace that the cigarettes are made is very fast, with “expert” children rolling then in a matter of seconds. These so-called expert rollers roll up to two thousand beedies a day. In order to keep the tremendous pace, the employers watch over the children like hawks watching their prey. The children are scolded or are often hit if the pace is not up to their standard. Children have been known to be forced to work with a matchbox tucked in between their neck and chin. If the matchbox falls, the employer thus knows that the child has not been focusing on the job at hand. Hence, the children are punished yet again.
These children working in the beedi industry work up to fourteen hours a day at one time with very short breaks for lunch and dinner. They work almost seven days a week and are only children sometimes don’t come into work, which leads to the employer coming to their house and forcefully taking them in, even if they are sick or unable to work because of the abuse.
Punishment in these factories is very common as a result to a number of infractions by the children. These include arriving late to work, making a mistake, working slowly, or even talking to another child. These infractions cause being hit with a sick or the open hand of the employer. Activists have raided such factories and have seen a variety of things. Ranging from the matchbox under the chin to children being shackled to the floor by their legs. These punishments have decreased in the places where activists have shown interest, but it goes on quite prevalently in the remote areas of India.
The beedi industry is a very hazardous to the children working in the factories. The long hour that the children remain in that hunched over position interferes with normal growth pattern. The children that roll often develop back ailments and they usually suffer from stunting of their growth. In addition to these back ailments, they develop pain in their hands and wrists, which is caused by the continuous motion as they are rolling and tying the cigarettes. However, these are minor when compared to the greater risk of developing lung disease. The children spend their lives inhaling the tobacco dust, which also causes asthma and tuberculosis.
The employers justify this kind of labor stating that it benefits the entire country, community, family, craft and child. They say that the children must be taught the skill at a very young age or they will never pick up a skill in life. When compared to a child that picks up the craft at an older age, he can develop the skill; however, he or she would not be able to roll at the pace of the children who picked it up at an earlier age. This justification of the practice ensures continuous availability of child labor at very low wages.
This practice of debt bondage in India goes against a lot of International Laws that India has signed and swore it would uphold. In addition to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it has breached Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act of 1976, the Minimum Wages Act of 1948, the Forced Labor Convention on 1930, the Convention on the Rights of a Child in 1989, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, The Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act and a whole lot more.
According to the Government of India, bonded labor and child labor are inevitable. It is caused by the high poverty rates of the country and will take a great deal to stop it. It represents the natural order of life and cannot be changed by force. It must be evolved slowly toward eradication of such a harsh practice. The Government has done little to help these vulnerable children and it seems that they might not do much. They are trying to maintain their competitive lead in the world marketplace.
The last thing that the Indian Government has ever tried to do was initiated by the former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who announced in 1994 that he would bring two million children out of the hazardous child labor. This figure only accounts for three percent of the children in these hazardous, harsh practices. What will happen to the other ninety seven percent? The new Government of India that was elected in 1996 has also announced that they will eradicate all child labor in India and provide free compulsory elementary school; however, nothing has been done to fulfill this promise and maybe nothing will be done.
Works Cited
1. Human Rights Watch. The Small Hands of Slavery Page. September 1996. United States of America. 14 November 2001 <http://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/India3.htm>