Determined to fund the education of his two sons and daughter, Panchanan Muduli, 44, of Balangir, a western Odisha district that depends on rain for agriculture, left home in early 2025 for Hyderabad. He had been promised work on a poultry farm and a place to sleep with the chicks he would be rearing. Though the wages were meagre, just ₹10,00 a month, he felt he would at least get a steady income he could send home. The stench, the humiliation, the loneliness proved unbearable. In about a month, he quit and began the journey home.
At Vijayawada railway station, desperation caught up with him. A fishery farm owner offered him work. Muduli agreed. What followed was worse: 15-hour workdays, makeshift shelters, and a job that tied him to the place he worked at. He and other labourers lived under constant watch and fear for seven months, he says.
One day, when a relative of the owner died, the labourers escaped. They walked for hours through the forest to flee captivity from Perumallapuram village in East Godavari District of Andhra Pradesh. Muduli was later rescued by officials of Telangana’s Nagarkurnool district and declared a bonded labourer under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.
He returned to his village Dumerpadar carrying the hope that the law would help him rebuild his life. Months passed. Help did not come, he says. Within five months of rescue, Muduli chose to migrate again. This time, with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. They moved to a brick kiln in Telangana in November 2025, and continue to work there.
The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, then a landmark in India’s history, completed 50 years of enactment in February 2026. It came into force retrospectively in October 1975 and is “the system of forced, or partly forced, labour under which a debtor enters… into an agreement with the creditor…” The reasons are generally economic or caste-based, both of which the law covers.
Under the Act, which has not been amended since its enactment, the State government is required to conduct periodic surveys to ascertain the presence of bonded labourers. However, the last source of data is the Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC)-2011. As per its assessment, 8,304 bonded labourers mostly tribals, were rescued and released in Odisha. The number of legally released bonded labourers in the country was 1.65 lakh. However, the Odisha government never revealed what action it had taken to identify and rehabilitate these 8,304 people.
Five decades after its enactment, the term “bonded labourer” continues to evoke images of slavery, something many believed had vanished with colonial rule in India. Every district administration in Odisha was asked to create a corpus fund of ₹10 lakh so that immediate relief could be provided to released bonded labour. Half the districts in Odisha, do not have such a fund.
Individuals and families migrate
In 2017, Dambarudhar Majhi, 35, from Odisha’s Nuapada district had migrated to Karnataka in search of survival, only to find himself trapped in what he now calls the worst ordeal of his life. He and his family slept beside heaps of rotting chicks. Cleaning droppings from dawn to dusk became routine.
“The three months we spent inside the poultry farm felt less like work and more like a punishment. It was worse than the hell described in mythologies,” he says. “The owner had promised us ₹10,000 a month, but wages rarely came. He would not allow us to leave,” Majhi recalls. In desperation, the couple secretly sent their children away with a relative. By chance, the children stumbled upon labour officials at Yesvantpur Junction railway station. What followed was a rescue operation. “That day, we got our freedom,” he says.
Nine years on, the rescue certificate remains carefully preserved in their home, but the rehabilitation promised under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act never arrived, he says. Fearful of returning to migration, the couple now survives on daily wage work, but they can get just one meal a day.
Their story echoes that of Jayaraj Jagat from Nuapada, who, along with his wife, was rescued from a brick kiln in Tamil Nadu in 2012. They received ₹19,000 each as rehabilitation assistance, they say. For a brief period, the money offered relief and dignity, allowing them to stay back in their village. But the poverty and lack of opportunity to earn in their village proved relentless.
Jayaraj Jagat and his wife, who hail from Odisha’s Nuapada district, and were rescued as bonded labourers in 2012, are working in a brick kiln in Telangana. Photo: Special arrangement
By 2017, the couple had no choice but to migrate again. They returned to the same cycle of exploitation. For six months each year, they lived under 6-foot-high makeshift shelters in brick kilns, working up to 14 hours a day. Illness was a luxury they could not afford. Hunger, debt, and compulsion left them with no exit. Currently, they are working in a brick kiln in Telangana.
Freedom sans relief
Delays in rehabilitation assistance are a problem, especially for inter-State migrant labourers. “When rehabilitation is delayed, rescued labourers are pushed back into the same profession, no matter how harsh or exploitative the conditions are,” says Umi Daniel, Director of Migration and Education, Aid et Action, an international non-profit working at the intersection of poverty and education.
Timely financial support is only the first step. “We may have freed people physically from their captors, but not from the debt that binds them. Helping them stand on their own feet is a long-term process,” Daniel adds. Without sustained support, rescue becomes a temporary interruption, not a permanent escape.
The law mandates close monitoring of rescued bonded labourers, with their details recorded in official registers. It also requires the District Collector to designate an officer to oversee their rehabilitation and ensure long-term protection. District-level vigilance committees, chaired by the Collector, are meant to anchor this process.
The Odisha nodal officer responsible for rehabilitation of released bonded labourers, Binod Senapati, says he was unaware that people were not being assisted. “Whenever other States inform us about rescue and release of our labourers, we immediately inform the District Collectors to take care of them,” he says.
Daniel says rehabilitation cannot be reduced to a one-time cash payment. “Survivors must be linked to anti-poverty programmes such as housing, livelihood schemes, and social security to break the cycle of vulnerability,” says Daniel.
Jagat echoes this: “I am good at tailoring. My wife too knows a little bit of tailoring. Had we been provided handholding support, I would not have migrated to another State to work in such harsh working conditions.”
Daniel says that there was one sustained intervention in Odisha, when nearly 1,200 rescued bonded labourers from 500 families were rehabilitated (from 2010–2015) and connected to government welfare programmes, “helping them rebuild their lives with dignity”.
Before 2016, the Centre and State government used to pay ₹10,000 each as assistance to a labourer after their rescue from bondage. Under the 1976 law, identification, release and rehabilitation of freed bonded labour is the direct responsibility of States and Union Territories.
However, in 2016, the Ministry of Labour and Employment introduced the Central Sector Scheme for Rehabilitation of Bonded Labourers, later strengthened and relaunched in 2022. Fully funded by the Centre, the scheme does not require any matching contribution from State governments. It guarantees immediate relief of up to ₹30,000 to each rescued labourer, followed by graded rehabilitation assistance of ₹1 lakh, ₹2 lakh, or ₹3 lakh, depending on the gender, severity of exploitation, and vulnerability. The assistance is meant to be a foundation for rebuilding lives after bondage. Yet, hundreds of released bonded labourers continue to wait for rehabilitation.
Few understand this gap better than Baghambar Patnaik, a septuagenarian civil rights activist who has taken up the cause of 1,472 released bonded labourers before the Orissa Human Rights Commission. The petition covers 1,085 labourers from Balangir district, 44 from Subarnapur district, 28 from Bargarh district, 114 from Nuapada district, and 201 from Kalahandi district.
“A labour collective, Shramvahini, coordinated the rescue of hundreds of workers from different States. Most were migrant labourers from western Odisha who had endured bonded conditions,” Patnaik says. “They underwent summary trials before Sub-Divisional Magistrates in the districts where they were rescued and were issued release certificates. But rehabilitation never followed,” he points out, adding that many returned to the same exploitative work they had escaped.
The activist, who spent time in jail when he led a silent rally of barbers, attributes the failure largely to poor awareness and weak accountability within the administration. “The law exists. The provisions exist. What is missing is timely action,” he says.
Caste-based bondage
Bondage in many villages survives not through chains, but through caste. For generations, families from barber and washermen communities have remained trapped in hereditary servitude, paid not in wages but in a few kilograms of rice. The arrangement, unwritten, yet rigidly enforced, passes from one generation to the next.
“We are forced to perform tasks like shaving villagers during death rituals, clearing leftover food after feasts, and carrying ceremonial offerings on our shoulders,” says Lalatendu Barik of Brahampur village.
“This work is imposed on us by birth. There is no escape. Anyone who resists faces social boycott,” he continues.
When members of these communities began resisting the system, the backlash was swift. They faced intimidation, exclusion, and economic isolation from dominant caste villagers.
Following sustained protests by people and intervention by civil society groups, hundreds were formally identified as bonded labourers and issued release certificates under the 1976 Act. But acknowledgement did not translate into rehabilitation, they say.
“Due to lack of administrative sensitivity, the State government failed to send rehabilitation proposals to the Centre,” says Patnaik, who has moved both the Orissa High Court and the Orissa Human Rights Commission seeking justice for the affected families. “Years later, instead of extending assistance, the government cancelled many of their release certificates,” he alleges.
As many as 1,283 people from tehsils, including Brahmagiri, Krushnaprasad, Delang, and Nimapara in Puri district, were once officially recognised as bonded labourers. Today, many of those certificates stand revoked.
Barik is among them. “I was declared a bonded labourer on March 3, 2016. But an April 8, 2025 report says I am no longer one because I have stopped performing customary services,” he says.
Patnaik calls it a denial of reality. “This reflects deep bureaucratic ignorance,” he says. “The government is unwilling to acknowledge that caste-based bondage still exists and comes under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976,” he says.
Daniel says implementation of the law remains weak as it requires coordination among various departments like labour, revenue, panchayati raj, and the police. “There is no clear ownership, defined roles, or standard operating procedures to ensure that the historic Act benefits the most vulnerable,” he says.
satyasundar.b@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
