Agri labour as bonded labour : Pakistan perspective

Sindh has the highest rate of landlessness farmer families in Pakistan. More than 40 percent of the land in Sindh is tenanted out by big landlords. On the other hand, landlords in Punjab are much smaller than those in Sindh, with an average holding of only seven acres, compared to a landlord in Sindh, who is on average estimated to own 28 acres. Position of the poorer cultivators in other provinces of the country is by no means ideal, human development indicators in rural areas of Sindh are amongst the worst in Pakistan.

It would not be surprising that of the over 1.7 million people estimated to be engaged in bonded labour in Pakistan by the ILO, the majority of them are landless tillers (‘haris’) in Sindh. Problem of bonded labour is day by day increasing in Sindh. In earlier times, only big landlords used to have bonded labourers but now even mid-range farmers are also enslaving desperate people by lending them money. During the period that they are bonded, labourers and their families are kept in detention. Often the wives and children of male labourers are also held in custody. Recent statistics complied by an NGOs working for the abolishment of bonded labour in different parts of Sindh, estimated that there were about 1.2 to 1.3 million people engaged in bonded labour in this province alone.

Some elected representatives of Sindh tried to introduce legislative protection for the vast majority of its tenants subsequent to partition. In 1950, the Sindh Assembly passed the Sindh Tenancy Act. This legal measure aimed to simultaneously address the duties of tenants and landlords and to provide means for the division of produce between them. However, the Act was never properly implemented, and it was also manipulated by landlords to continue extracting surplus from their tenants. According to this Act, neither the ‘hari’ nor his family is required to provide free labour to the ‘zamindar’. But as neither tasks nor working hours are strictly specified, determining what constitutes free labour and what does not is difficult and subject to the individual discretion of the landlord. As a result, disturbing cases of entire families being dominated by their landlord to pay back insoluble debts which have accumulated over the generations recurrently keep cropping up.

According to the rules, all bonded labourers should have been freed under the subsequently introduced Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1992, and those responsible for keeping them in bondage should have been prosecuted. However, such is not the case since the political and financial strength of the landlord’s allows them to continue using bonded labourers with impunity. Lack of empowerment of the rural workforce is another reason which allows this exploitative practice to persist. Given the vulnerability of the underprivileged landless poor, the need to strike some sort of a balance in the asymmetric power relations between landlord and cultivators is evident.

Pakistan’s Industrial Relations Ordinance of 1969 (IRO) provides for the right of industrial workers to form trade unions, even if these unions are subject to a variety of restrictions. On the other hand, Pakistani law is particularly hard on agricultural workers who are even denied the right to form unions, which prevents them from bargaining collectively, or making any demands on their employers, or check against brutalities like forced labour.