There are facts so morally jarring that the mind instinctively recoils. Not because they are false—but because they are intolerably real. One such fact is this: slavery did not end in the nineteenth century. It simply moved, changed form, and became economically invisible to those who benefit from it.
Nowhere is this more evident than in India, a country that is simultaneously home to cutting-edge technology sectors and some of the largest populations of bonded child labourers on Earth.
This contradiction is not an anomaly. It is the system working exactly as designed.
The Mechanism of Bonded Child Labour
The typical mechanism is brutally simple. A poor family, often from the lowest social strata, requires money for survival: food, medicine, or debt repayment. A local lender offers a loan. The amount may be trivial by Western standards — sometimes the equivalent of fifty or sixty US dollars — but to the family it represents survival.
The contract, if written at all, may be incomprehensible to them. Interest rates are punitive. Repayment schedules are unrealistic. Default is inevitable.
When repayment fails, the lender claims collateral, not land, not property, but a child.
This practice, known as bonded labour, is illegal under Indian law. It has been illegal for decades. And yet illegality alone has never been a reliable mechanism for eliminating profitable behaviour.
The child may then be transferred into industries where compliance is easily enforced and oversight is minimal: brick kilns, textile workshops, agricultural estates, domestic service, and in some cases the commercial sex trade.
These children do not appear in corporate annual reports. They appear only as cost reductions.
Recent data from sources like the U.S. Department of Labor (2024 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor) and the Global Slavery Index indicate that India has an estimated 11 million people in modern slavery overall, with children comprising a significant portion through bonded labour in sectors like brick kilns, agriculture, domestic work, mining, and garment production. Official Indian census figures from 2011 reported around 10 million child labourers aged 5–14, though NGOs and recent analyses suggest the true number, factoring in hidden, unreported cases, could be higher, with millions in hazardous or forced conditions. Bonded labour often begins with small loans (sometimes as low as $50–$100) to desperate families, trapping entire households in cycles of debt where children are pledged as collateral. These kids, frequently aged 6–14, endure gruelling work in brick kilns, stone quarries, or households, facing physical abuse, malnutrition, and — in extreme cases — death followed by organ trafficking rumours (though verified organ harvesting linked to child labour is rare and hard to substantiate broadly).
Slavery Without Chains
Modern slavery differs from its historical predecessor in one crucial respect: it is decentralised and deniable.
There are no auction blocks visible to tourists. No public ownership documents. Instead, there are subcontractors, intermediaries, and supply chains so fragmented that responsibility dissolves before it can be assigned.
A Western consumer purchases a cheap rug, garment, or construction material. The product passes through exporters, distributors, and retailers. By the time it arrives on a shelf in London, Sydney, or New York, its origins have been morally sanitised.
The slave labour is still present — but it has been converted into a competitive price.
In this way, modern slavery operates less as a moral aberration than as a structural feature of global economic efficiency.
Why We Hear So Little About It?
The silence surrounding this issue is not accidental. It emerges from the convergence of several powerful incentives.
First, economic incentives discourage scrutiny.
India is one of the world's largest economies and a crucial manufacturing hub. Governments and corporations alike benefit from stable trade relationships. Raising persistent, uncomfortable questions about systemic labour exploitation complicates those relationships.
Moral clarity is often inversely proportional to economic dependence.
Second, the story lacks narrative appeal.
Modern media environments prioritise novelty, outrage cycles, and emotionally satisfying narratives. Bonded labour is neither new nor easily resolved. It is complex, entrenched, and resistant to simple solutions.
A problem without a clear villain or a quick victory does not sustain attention.
Third, the victims are socially invisible.
Many bonded labourers come from historically marginalised communities, including Dalit populations, groups that have endured centuries of social exclusion. Their suffering generates little political leverage, either domestically or internationally.
Visibility, in the modern world, is a form of power. These children possess none.
Fourth, moral attention is a scarce resource.
Western societies are intensely focused on internal cultural conflicts, identity, language, representation, symbolic harms. These issues dominate discourse because they occur within the visible social sphere.
Distant suffering, by contrast, remains abstract. It does not interrupt daily life.
The result is not conspiracy but prioritisation. We attend most closely to what affects us directly.
The Comfort of Distance
There is also a deeper psychological dimension. Modern Western prosperity is entangled with global labour asymmetries. Cheap goods require cheap labour. Cheap labour often exists where legal protections are weak and poverty is extreme.
To fully confront this reality would require confronting uncomfortable truths about the moral structure of global consumption. It is easier, and psychologically safer, not to look too closely.
Distance provides moral insulation.
The Persistence of Ancient Hierarchies: India's rapid modernisation has not erased older social hierarchies. Economic growth and technological sophistication coexist with entrenched inequality. In many regions, poverty limits access to education, legal recourse, and mobility.
Where poverty and powerlessness intersect, exploitation follows naturally. Slavery, in this sense, is not an anomaly. It is the predictable outcome of extreme asymmetry.
The Modern Paradox
We live in what is often described as the most morally enlightened era in human history. Slavery is universally condemned in principle. International conventions prohibit it. Governments formally outlaw it. And yet millions remain enslaved in practice.
This is not because modern societies secretly approve of slavery. It is because the system does not require approval. It requires only indifference.
The Invisible Foundation
Modern civilisation rests upon vast networks of production that remain largely unseen by those who benefit from them. The physical and moral distance between consumer and producer creates a buffer in which responsibility becomes abstract. The result is a peculiar moral equilibrium: universal condemnation coexisting with widespread continuation. Slavery survives not in spite of modernity, but within it.
Seeing What Is Already There
The most uncomfortable truth is not that slavery exists. It is that it exists quietly, persistently, and largely without disrupting the moral self-image of the societies most capable of opposing it. It continues not because it is hidden, but because it is structurally peripheral to those with the power to change it.
What is invisible is not the practice itself, but its place in our collective moral attention. And what remains unseen can continue indefinitely.
https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/child-trafficking-and-child-labor-continues-to-plague-india/