India: Bonded Labor Is Illegal But on The Rise, Captive In A Chicken Coop: NPR. Debt Bondage, Forced Labor, Peonage
- 'Captive in a chicken coop: The plight of debt bondage workers,' NPR, Dec. 10, 2023.
For nearly a week last summer, Shanta Bai, a farmworker, says she was held captive in a chicken coop in a remote farm on the outskirts of a village in southern state of Karnataka in India. She was locked in the cramped quarters with other women. They used the corner of the coop for going to the bathroom.
Her husband, Jairam, also a captive, was tied up in a cowshed nearby.
The couple say they were were among a dozen farm workers from the neighboring state of Maharashtra who were being held in what's called "debt bondage" by the contractor who had brought them to work in the farms during the sugarcane harvest season. That phrase means they owed money to the contractor and would not be released until they (or their relatives) repaid the debt.
"We were told that we hadn't done sufficient work to cover the amount he had paid us. He said we owed him two lakh rupees [the equivalent of $2,400], and he wouldn't let us go unless we paid him back," said Shanta Bai as she lit a small bonfire to prepare dinner — a modest serving of lentils and flatbread, outside her one-room house in Dharur, a village in Maharashtra's Beed district.
Shanta Bai is a laborer who is hired by contractors to work in sugarcane fields and sugar factories in the region that has been dubbed the "sugar-belt" of India. "The mukkadam [contractor] said that I did not work as per the contract, but every day I filled two whole vehicles with harvest, without taking a day off, even on days I was sick, he expected us to work," she told NPR...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/10/1213009464/forced-labor-debt-bondage-india-sugarcane
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- (Wiki). DEBT BONDAGE, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, or where the debt is excessively large the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined or excessive debt repayment. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely.
Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation. Currently, debt bondage is the most common method of enslavement with an estimated 8.1 million people bonded to labour illegally as cited by the International Labour Organization in 2005. Debt bondage has been described by the United Nations as a form of "modern day slavery" and the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery seeks to abolish the practice.
The practice is still prevalent primarily in South Asia and parts of Western and Southern Africa, although most countries in these regions are parties to the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery. It is estimated that 84 to 88% of the bonded labourers in the world are in South Asia. Lack of prosecution or insufficient punishment of this crime are the leading causes of the practice as it exists at this scale today.
Although debt bondage, forced labour, and human trafficking are all defined as forms or variations of slavery, each term is distinct. Debt bondage differs from forced labour and human trafficking in that a person consciously pledges to work as a means of repayment of debt without being placed into labor against will.
Debt bondage only applies to individuals who have no hopes of leaving the labor due to inability to ever pay debt back. Those who offer their services to repay a debt and the employer reduces the debt accordingly at a rate commensurate with the value of labor performed are not in debt bondage.
- History: East & West Africa; Americas, Indentured Servants, Bonded Workers; Asia, Serfs.. In Peru, a peonage system existed from the 16th century until land reform in the 1950s...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage
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(Wiki) PEON, PEONAGE. Peon (English /ˈpiːɒn/, from the Spanish peón Spanish pronunciation: [peˈon]) usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the US, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon
