Human Bondage
Tracing its Roots in India
- Lakshmidhar Mishra - National Human Rights Commission, India
The author discusses the socio-economic characteristics that accompany bondage: caste, illiteracy, landlessness and land tenure issues, alienation of land, lack of skills, poor employment and wage conditions, indebtedness, migration, and globalization.
Extreme forms of bondage, including child labour, trafficking in women and children, and social forms like devadasis and yoginis have also been covered.
The book explores important factors like the legal framework, policy interventions, solutions and the role of the various stakeholders-media, government, trade unions and NGOs-in tackling this issue.
The book is essentially about human freedom and dignity-the quintessence of human existence-and the forces that rob them, the dispossessed victims, consequences of dispossession, and ways and means of restoration.
The book provides thoughtful insights into many dimensions of the social evil of bonded labour. [It] is a great eye-opener for economists, leaders and policy-makers who have become complacent because of their satisfaction with India’s growth story…The author has done a brilliant work by agitating the consciousness of all sensitive human beings in our society…this book draws the attention of those who matter and acts as a ray of hope for economically exploited helpless and weaker sections of society.
Combining humanist sensitivity with the diligence of a committed public servant, and a careful reading of the law, [Mishra’s] book is an encyclopaedic record of labour unfreedoms, past and present. [The author] traces ancient roots to contemporary forms of bonded labour in India... [He] unravels the riddle of the perpetuation of unfree labour in free India.
