‘Open prison’: The forced labour driving India’s $5 trillion economy dream
Amid the relentless clatter of machinery, Ravi Kumar Gupta feeds a roaring steel furnace with scrap, blown metal and molten iron. He carefully adds chemicals tailored to the type of steel being produced, adjusting fuel and airflow with precision to keep the furnace running smoothly.
As his shift ends about 4pm, he stops briefly at a roadside tea shop just outside the gates of the steel factory in Maharashtra state’s Tarapur Industrial Area. His safety helmet is still on, but his feet, instead of being shielded by boots, are in worn-out slippers – scant protection against the molten metal he works with. His eyes are bloodshot with exhaustion, and his green, full-sleeved shirt and faded, torn blue jeans are stained with grease and sweat.
Four years after migrating from Barabanki, a district in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Ravi earns $175 per month – $25 less than India’s monthly per capita income. And the paycheques are often delayed, arriving only between the 10th and 12th of each month.
Middlemen, who are either locals or longterm migrants posing as locals, supply labour to factories in Maharashtra, India’s industrial heartland. In return, the middlemen skim between $11 and $17 from each worker’s wages. In addition, $7 is deducted monthly from their pay for canteen food, which consists of limited portions of rice, dal and vegetables for lunch, as well as evening tea.
Asked why he continues to work at the steel factory, Ravi responds with resignation in his voice: “What else can I do?”
Giving up his job isn’t an option. His family – two young daughters in school, his wife and mother who work on their small plot of farmland, and his ailing father who is unable to work – depend on the $100 a month that he is able to send home. Climate change, he says, has “ruined farming”, the family’s traditional occupation.
“The rains don’t come when they should. The land no longer feeds us. And where are the jobs in our village? There’s nothing left. So, like the others, I left,” he says, his thick, calloused hands wrapped around a cup of tea.
Ravi is a cog in the wheel of the soaring dreams of the world’s fifth-largest economy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has boldly spoken of making India a $5 trillion economy, up from $3.5 trillion in 2023.
But as Modi’s government woos global investors and assures them that it is easy today to do business in India, Ravi is among millions of workers whose stories of withheld wages, endless toil and coercion – telltale signs of forced labour, according to the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO) – provide a haunting snapshot of the ugly underbelly of the country’s economy.
The Factories Act of 1948, which governs working conditions in steel mills like the one where Ravi works, mandates annual paid leave for workers who have been employed for 240 days or more in a year. However, workers like Ravi do not receive paid leave. Any day taken off is unpaid, regardless of the reason.
Like many others, Ravi is required to work all seven days a week, totalling 30 days a month, despite the fact that Sundays were officially declared a weekly holiday for all labourers in India as far back as 1890.
Workers in many Indian factories do not receive a salary slip detailing their earnings and deductions. This lack of transparency leaves them in the dark about how much money has been deducted – or why.
Worse still, if a worker is absent for three or four consecutive days, their entry card is deactivated. Upon returning, they are treated as a new employee. This reclassification affects their eligibility for important benefits such as the provident fund and end-of-service gratuity.
In many cases, workers are forced to rejoin under these unfair terms simply because their pending wages – either direct from the company or via the middlemen – have not been paid. Walking away would mean forfeiting their hard-earned money.
In addition to all this, Ravi confirms that neither he nor his colleagues, both in his company and in nearby factories within the industrial area, have received any written contracts outlining their job roles or employment benefits.
According to a 2025 study (PDF) published in the Indian Journal of Legal Review, many workers face exploitation through unfair contracts, wage theft and forced labour due to the absence of written agreements. These practices particularly affect more vulnerable groups like migrants, women and low-skilled workers, who often have limited access to legal recourse. Al Jazeera contacted the Maharashtra Labour Commissioner on May 20 seeking a response to concerns around forced labour in industries where workers like Ravi are employed, but has not received a reply.
There is also the absence of adequate safety gear: Ravi works near the furnace, where temperatures cross 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). But workers aren’t provided with protective glass. “Neither the middlemen nor the employer gives us even the most basic safety gear,” he says.
Yet, helplessness wins.
“We know how dangerous it is. We know what we need to stay safe,” he says. “But what choice do we have?
“When you’re desperate, you have no choice but to adapt to these harsh, uncertain conditions,” he said.
In the port town of Kakinada, along India’s Bay of Bengal coast – about 1,400km (870 miles) from where Ravi works – 47-year-old Sumitha Salomi earns even less than him.
A shrimp peeler, Sumitha has no formal job contract with the factory where she works. Like many others, she has been hired through a contractor – a woman from her own village. The factory, a heavily fortified facility that exports peeled vannamei shrimp to the United States, employs migrant workers from the neighbouring state of Odisha and other regions. The premises are tightly guarded, and access is strictly controlled.
But in the villages where the factory’s workers live, a common story emerges: None of them have written contracts. No one has social security or health benefits. The only work gear they have are gloves and caps – not for their safety, but to maintain hygiene standards for the exported shrimp.
India exported shrimp worth $2.7bn to the US in the 2023-24 fiscal year, according to official figures.
Sumitha explains that her pay depends on the weight of the shrimp she peels. “The only break we get is about 30 minutes for lunch. For women, even when we’re in severe menstrual pain, there’s no rest, no relief. We just keep working,” she says.
She earns about $4.50 a day. She knows the precarity of her job. Her wages are handed to her in cash, without any payslip, leaving her with no way to contest what she receives.
As a divorced mother, Sumitha carries the burden of multiple responsibilities. She’s still repaying loans she took for her elder daughter’s marriage, while also trying to keep her younger daughter in school. On top of that, she cares for her elderly widowed mother who needs cancer medication that costs about $10 a month.
But she does not question the factory bosses about her working conditions or the absence of a written contract. “I have a job – contract or no contract. That’s what matters,” she says, her voice stoic.
“There are no other jobs here in this village. If I start asking questions and get thrown out, what then?”
Unlike seasoned veteran Sumitha, 23-year-old Minnu Samay is still grappling with the harsh realities of her job in the seafood industry.
Minnu, a migrant worker from the eastern state of Odisha, is employed at a shrimp processing factory located within the high-security Krishnapatnam Port area in Nellore, about 500km (310 mile) south of Kakinada.
Migrant workers like Minnu are allowed to leave the factory just once a week for about three hours, mainly to buy essentials in Muthukur, a village 10km (6 miles) from the factory. As she hurries through the narrow market lanes, picking up sanitary pads and snacks during this brief window of freedom, she tells her story.
“I was 19 when I left home. Poverty forced me. My parents were deep in debt after marrying off my two sisters. It was hard to survive,” Minnu says. “So when we met an agent in our town, he arranged this job here.”
Slowly, she has learned while on the job, cutting and peeling shrimp. Minnu earns approximately $110 per month.
“We know we’re being exploited, our freedom is restricted, we have no health insurance or proper rights, and we’re constantly under surveillance,” she says. “But like many of my coworkers, we don’t have other options. We just adjust and keep going.”
Most overtime work is not paid, she said. “We’re watched by cameras every moment, trapped in what feels like an open prison,” she says.
On May 20, Al Jazeera sent queries to the Andhra Pradesh Labour Department, and on May 22, to the Indian Ministry of Labour, seeking responses to concerns over widespread forced labour in industries where workers like Sumitha and Minnu are employed. Kakinada and Nellore are in Andhra Pradesh state. Neither the Andhra Pradesh Labour Department nor the federal Indian Ministry of Labour has responded.
Labour rights experts say that these stories lay bare the urgent need for enforceable contracts, the abolition of exploitative hiring practices and initiatives to educate workers about their rights – vital measures to combat forced labour in India’s unorganised and semi-organised sectors.
On March 24, India’s federal Labour Minister Shobha Karandlaje told parliament that approximately 307 million unorganised workers (PDF), including migrant workers, were registered under an Indian government scheme.
But researchers say that the true scale of India’s unorganised workforce is likely even larger.
Benoy Peter, executive director of the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID), a civil society organisation based in the southern Indian state of Kerala, cited a document (PDF) from India’s National Sample Survey Organization, which said that the country’s total workforce is approximately 470 million in strength. Of this, about 80 million workers are in the organised sector, while the remaining 390 million – more than the entire population of the United States – are in the unorganised sector.
The UN International Labour Organization’s India Employment Report 2024 (PDF) supports Benoy’s observation, stating that low-quality jobs in the informal sector and informal employment are the dominant forms of work in India. The ILO report said that 90 percent of India’s workforce is “informally employed”.
And many of these workers are victims of forced or bonded labour. India ratified the ILO’s Forced Labour Convention 29 in 1954 and abolished bonded labour in 1975. Yet, according to the Walk Free Foundation, India has the highest estimated number of people living in modern slavery worldwide, with 11.05 million individuals (eight in every 1,000) affected.
The real numbers, again, are likely worse.
In 2016, the then Indian Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya informed Parliament that the country had an estimated 18.4 million bonded labourers, and that the government was working to release and rehabilitate them by 2030.
But in December 2021, when Indian parliamentarian Mohammad Jawed inquired (PDF) about this target in parliament, the government stated that only approximately 12,000 bonded labourers had been rescued and rehabilitated between 2016 and 2021.
The textile sector is among the worst offenders.
According to a parliamentary document from March this year, the southern Tamil Nadu state led textile and apparel exports, including handicrafts, with a value of $7.1bn. Gujarat, Modi’s home state, followed in second place, exporting $5.7bn worth of these goods.
Thivya Rakini, president of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU), says that in a decade of visiting factories to work with garment workers, she has, in almost all instances, seen at least one – and often multiple – indicators of forced labour as defined by the ILO. Those indicators include intimidation, excessive overtime, withheld wages, sexual harassment, and physical violence, such as slapping or beating workers for failing to meet production targets.
India’s textiles industry has around 45 million workers, including 3.5 million handloom workers across the country.
“Forced labour in the textile industry is widespread and often concealed,” Thivya says. “It’s not a random occurrence. It stems directly from the business model of fashion brands. When brands pay suppliers low prices, demand large volumes on tight deadlines, and fail to ensure freedom of association or basic grievance mechanisms for workers, they create an environment ripe for forced labour.”
Women make up 60-80 percent of the garment workforce, she says. “Many lack formal contracts, earn less than men for the same work, and face frequent violence and harassment,” she said. Many are from marginalised groups – Dalits, migrants or single mothers – making them even more vulnerable in a patriarchal society.
Other sectors are plagued by forced labour too. Transparentem, an independent, nonprofit organisation focused on uncovering and addressing human rights and environmental abuses in global supply chains, investigated 90 cotton farms in the central state of Madhya Pradesh from June 2022 to March 2023 and released its final report (PDF) in January 2025, uncovering child labour, forced labour and unsafe conditions: Children were handling pesticides without protection.
Between 2019 and 2020, the Indian government consolidated 29 federal labour laws into four comprehensive codes. The stated aim of these reforms was to improve the ease of doing business while ensuring worker welfare. As part of this effort, the total number of compliance provisions was significantly reduced – from more than 1,200 to 479.
However, while many states have drafted rules needed to implement these codes, there has still not been a nationwide rollout of these laws.
Supporters of the new labour codes argue that they modernise outdated laws and provide greater legal clarity. Critics, however, particularly trade unions, warn that the reforms favour employers and dilute worker protections. One of the codes, for instance, makes it harder to register a workers union.
A union must now have a minimum of 10 percent of the workers or 100 workers, whichever is less, in an establishment to be members of a union, a significant rise from the earlier requirement of just seven workers under the Trade Unions Act, 1926.
Santosh Poonia from India Labour Line – a helpline initiative that supports workers, especially in the unorganised sector, by offering legal aid, mediation and counselling services – tells Al Jazeera that if workers are barred from forming unions, that would weaken their collective bargaining rights.
“Without these rights, they will have no choice but to tolerate exploitative working conditions,” he says.
To Sanjay Ghose, a senior labour law lawyer practising at the Indian Supreme Court, the problem runs deeper than the new consolidated codes.
“The real issue is the failure to implement these laws effectively, which leaves workers vulnerable,” he says.
Ghose warns that India’s stagnating job creation could compound the exploitation and forced labour among workers.
India’s top engineering schools, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), have long prided themselves on how the world’s biggest banks, tech giants and other multinationals queue up at their gates each year to lure their graduates with massive pay packages.
Yet, the percentage of graduates from the IITs who secure jobs as they leave school has dropped sharply, by 10 percentage points, since 2021, when the Indian economy took a major hit from COVID-19 – a hit it hasn’t fully recovered from.
“Even graduates with high ranks from premier institutions like the IITs are struggling to secure job placements,” Ghose says. “With limited options available, job seekers are forced to accept whatever work they can find. This leads to exploitation, unfair working conditions, and, in some cases, forced labour.”
Pramod Kumar, a former United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) senior adviser, adds that weakened private investment and foreign direct investment (FDI) have made national growth largely dependent on government spending. Consequently, job opportunities are primarily limited to the informal sector, where unfair working conditions are prevalent, leading to exploitation and forced labour.
Private sector investment in India dropped to a three-year low of 11.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in fiscal year 2024, down from the pre-COVID average of 11.8 percent (fiscal years 2016-2020), according to ratings firm India Ratings & Research. Additionally, FDI in India declined by 5.6 percent year-on-year to $10.9bn in the October-December quarter of the last fiscal year, driven by global economic uncertainties.
Against that economic backdrop, Poonia, from the India Labour Line, says he can’t see how the government plans to meet its ambitious target of rescuing 18 million bonded labourers in India. He said he expects the opposite.
“The situation is going to worsen when the ease of doing business is prioritised over human rights and workers’ rights.”
Al Jazeera
