Mumbai: Sometime in February, while scrolling through his social media feed, rights activist Nitin Valvi came across a video. This short but compelling clip called for immediate intervention in rescuing over 100 labourers. The voiceover said that more than 100 men and women, along with several infants, were confined in a small room near Jejuri in Pune. The labourers belonged to the same Bhil tribe that Valvi comes from and were from villages near his own home in the Dhadgaon Taluka of Nandurbar.
Valvi says the video worried him, but he was not surprised.
Every year, especially around February and March, as labourers slowly start their return migration journey, activists receive numerous rescue calls. Nandurbar district – under the Fifth Schedule – sees an alarming number of both intra- and interstate migration every year. These labourers, who travel over 700 kilometres to the sugarcane belt in western Maharashtra, are invariably exploited, held captive, paid meagre wages, or even denied wages, and only somehow manage to return to their hometowns.
“I knew this case wouldn’t be any different and would require immediate intervention,” Valvi says.
Soon, a team of local activists was dispatched, and Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch, a collective working for labour rights, was alerted. With the help of Jejuri police, the team managed to release over 92 labourers on March 3. A few others had escaped from captivity. Upon reaching the location, Valvi says, the team discovered that a few more were still held hostage. They were later rescued on March 7.
None of the rescued labourers got paid for the six months of the hard labour work they were subjected to, Valvi says.
Cops ignore serious allegations of sexual crimes
At least two women labourers said they had been raped multiple times, and several others had been subjected to repeated molestation and sexual harassment. The two rape survivors shared that after the incident, they had walked over seven kilometres to the nearest Supe police station, but the police had sent them away.
The same police team from Jejuri that later got involved in the rescue operation had not agreed to register a first information report. This was a clear case of abduction, bonded labour, and rape, yet the labourers were turned down.
Finally, with the help of the collective, a Zero FIR was registered on March 10 at Dhadgaon in Nandurbar. The concept of Zero FIR was introduced in 2013, following the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee which was set up after the brutal 2012 Delhi gang rape case. This provision allows victims to register FIRs beyond the territorial limits of a cognisable offence.
Valvi says this was not an easy task either. “The moment we, along with the rescued labourers, reached the police station, the police alerted their counterparts in Pune and also Somnath Ganpat Dongekar, who had recruited and exploited the workers.”
Eventually, the police did file an FIR, but the crucial Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and the Bonded Labour Act were not applied. Dongekar and his associate Santosh Karse have been charged with rape.
Another rescue
Around 130 kilometres away in Tembhurni village in rural Solapur, another group of over 20 labourers and their children, again from the same Bhil tribe from Khargone district in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh, were found to be held hostage by the sugarcane factory owner.
Antil Sitole, an anti-caste activist from Khargone, received a call for rescue on March 6. “Before heading to Tembhurni, I got in touch with the Khargone collector and the labour inspector here. And in Tembhurni, the rescue operation was carried out with the help of the local police,” Sitole said.
Here, the labourers were held captive because the Mukadum, a foreman, had decided on the “rate card” per labourer in advance and had allegedly, after accepting the money, diverted the funds to other agents. The contractor, unhappy with this decision, unlawfully held the labourers.
Among them was 32-year-old Ramesh Bithla, who, along with his wife Parubai and three children – all under the age of four – had travelled from a tribal village in Khargone to Tembhurni village last October. When the contractor refused to pay them their six-months’ wages, Bithla decided to confront him.
This decision cost him dearly. He and his wife were allegedly beaten by the contractor Vishal Varade, and a tractor was run over his back. Bithla suffered serious spinal injuries, and Parubai sustained an injury to her face. Their children, who were caught in the scuffle, were also injured.
Sitole says the contractor had plans to forcefully move these labourers to another sugarcane factory and make them work for free. Holding labourers captive and moving them from one farm to another is a common form of exploitation seen in the sugar belt of Maharashtra.
A ‘mistake’
Although their rescue was carried out by the Tembhurni police, no FIR was registered in this case either.
When The Wire contacted Solapur (Rural) Superintendent of Police Atul Kulkarni for the reason behind not registering the FIR, he claimed that “the victims hadn’t come forward.” When asked further about why the police needed a complainant in a case where the police were directly involved in the rescue work and had witnessed the crime, Kulkarni admitted that his team had made a “mistake.” “It has been a mistake on our part. The police should have filed an FIR. We have asked Sitole and the victims to come to Solapur and file an FIR now,” Kulkarni told The Wire.
Sitole, a wheelchair-bound person, had spent his own money to travel to Solapur. He says neither the labour department nor the police made any arrangements to send the labourers back. “I had to hire two more vehicles to take them all back to their respective villages. And both Ramesh and Parubai have since been admitted to the Khargone civil hospital,” he shared.
Tembhurni is over 600 kilometres from Khargone. Kulkarni’s expectation that the victims travel all the way back to get the FIR registered is inhuman, Sitole says. “This is when the police are fully aware that the labourers were held hostage, were ill-treated, attacked, and after all this, not even paid their wages.”
Also read: Three Years of Slavery, Two Dead Children: The Cost of a Relative’s Rs 15,000 Debt
No ‘certificate’, ‘exaggerated’ claims
The Khargone labour officer, Amit Dodave, says the district administration is unable to help in the matter, as the Solapur district administration has refused to provide a “rescue certificate,” which is a prerequisite for availing compensation under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act. Dodave, under the law, can initiate action and even get an FIR registered, but he has not done that either.
The Tembhurni incident was the second rescue that Sitole was involved in this month.
On March 3, he had visited another farm in Ashta in Sangli on the Pandharpur Road, where a 17-year-old youth was allegedly abducted by the contractor who asked for a ransom of Rs 6 lakhs. Here, when the police refused to accompany Sitole in the rescue work, he, along with his family and a few activists from Khargone, tracked the boy down and rescued him. The boy told The Wire that the moment the contractor knew the police could trace his whereabouts, he was handed over Rs 250 and put into a bus. The boy was later found several kilometres away from the place where he was held captive.
Even when the police were in the know, they refused to register a complaint.
The Wire contacted Shrikrishna Katkadhond, the police inspector in charge of Ashta police station. Katkadhond said the claims of bonded labour were “exaggerated.” Labour officer Dodave too made similar claims but also added that the youth was only “detained,” which, according to Dodave, did not qualify the incident as an ‘abduction.’
Also read: No Bonded Labourers Exist In India, It is a Racket: Supreme Court
What can a law do?
Since mid-February, at least four instances of bonded labour have been detected in Maharashtra – this is as many as were reported in the whole of 2022 in the state, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. It is not that the number of cases in 2022 was fewer, but like the recent cases, both the labour department and the police refuse to intervene.
Sudhir Katiyar, a member of the core group on bonded labour of the National Human Rights Commission, says no state wants to acknowledge that the problem of bonded labour still exists. “So, the best option is to simply not register these cases or not add the crucial bonded labour law,” Katiyar says.
The legislation which came to force in 1976 defines a range of labour work like the system of forced, or partly forced, labour under which a debtor enters, or has, or is presumed to have, entered, into an agreement with the creditor as a criminal act under the law. The law also makes penal provisions for denial of agreed wages. Over years both the Union and the state government have evolved several mechanisms and rehabilitation programmes, including compensations, but unless the authorities recognise the victims of bonded labour as such, these programmes cannot be made the best use of.
