The Hindu Business Line : <I>Silk slaves and official apathy </I>

The gap between announced national priorities and how we carry them out is something we live with everyday. It was brought home most depressingly on Saturday in a BBC programme entitled India's Silk Slaves. An intrepid and relentless investigator pursues with his camera and mike the tale of Ashok Kumar, a boy working on a silk loom in the temple town of Kanchipuram.

The programme shows the stark reality of bonded labour performed by thousands of young boys in this world-renowned capital of the wedding sari, which, according to an estimate of labour unions, has some 12,000 silk slaves.

The children have no choice because they are put to work to pay back parental debts, often left behind for orphans to work off — sometimes as early as the age of seven, slogging twelve hours a day, all week. The children are tradable liabilities, because some other weaver can choose to buy them. Rates of calculating the interest can be imagined from the one instance where a thousand-rupee debt had mounted to six times that figure, and the wage of the slave is a pittance.

Indian law, supported by Supreme Court pronouncements, clearly abhors bonded labour and enjoins the officials to find and eradicate any such instances. When the civil servant in Delhi is approached with the facts, however, she first denies the existence of any bonded labour in India. She then refuses to comment on the specific case and finally, as a true bureaucrat, passes the buck back to the BBC reporter. If you are so keen, you should report this to the district collector, she says.

Denial, deflection

The collector, one Mr Yadav, denies on camera any knowledge of bonded labour in the town, suggesting that immediate action will be taken if any specific instance is brought to his attention. This is followed by a farcical scene where the officials very reluctantly agree to visit the boy's home. Finding that he has stepped out on an errand, they return post-haste to their office. How can they be expected to wait for the boy for a few minutes?

When the boy is finally produced in person, the routine of denial, deflection and prevarication continues until again a predictable excuse is found — they do not even know what to do with such cases, or what the law expects them to do. In the end, the collector does promise action and the boy is happy to go back to school ("but these fellows will run away, they don't want to study" is the official opinion) and is shown in the charge of a missionary who has the funds to provide him with the wherewithal for education.

Criminal insensitivity?

The documentary raises a huge list of issues. The most tragic one is this - why do otherwise well-intentioned people, in the service of the citizen, flatly refuse to even acknowledge the reality staring them in the face and simply refuse to accept the task to be done?

No one in his right mind can say that the government's intentions are unclear, but to say that there could be at the most 100 to 150 instances in the entire country, as the secretary in the Central government asserts on record, shows astonishing insensitivity to the truth. She then goes into the kind of vapid lecture that one hears so often in this country about colonialism, years of backwardness, the challenge of development, and so on.

Surely, the ordinary TV viewer is not so stupid that he or she can be fobbed off with such nonsensical babble? One may well wonder which the greater crime is: employing bonded labour, or refusing to admit that it exists, or refusing to even discuss it intelligently.

S. Ramachander

More Stories on : Children & Parenting | Jottings | Silk

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