IN an Islamic state, which ought to forbid Riba or usuary with its varied abuses, how can borrowing a small sum of money for distress spending result in enslavement of the borrower and his whole family, including children, and being put to work for the lender for years or decades?

Yet, this is happening in Pakistan, more pronouncedly in Sindh, in the name of bonded labour, for failure to repay the loan with the forbiddingly high interest on time.

Regardless of how long the borrower and his family, including children, work for the lending feudal lord, the debt never ends and he is not a free man for ages.

In the rural areas, where Islam is stronger than in the urban areas and the hold of the Mullah is more pronounced, religion does not interfere with such horrid practices, while the Mullah pronounces against the interest charged by the banks strongly and calls for Islamic banking, through and through.

If religion is against such abhorrent practices, the constitution of Pakistan too is against it and so are the laws of the country.

In fact, there is a specific law against bonded labour —- the Bonder Labour System (Abolition) Act 1992 which extinguishes even the outstanding amount (peshgi) from the bonded labour. The law prescribes imprisonment between two and five years and a fine of not less than Rs50,000 or both. The fine collected is to be paid to the bonded labour at the prescribed rates.

A fund for rehabilitation of the freed bonded labour has also been set up and under this project various services are rendered to the bonded labour, like providing free legal aid services and construction of low cost houses for them in Dadu district.

But in no area of human activities, the violation of the constitution and law is as absolute as in the case of bonded labour.

What is done is also against the law employing children, in this case of forced employment. And this evil practice has been exposed time and again; but that does not seem to cease because of the might of the feudal lords and the inefficiency of the district officials and impotence of the law.

This is one of the manifestations of the grass abuses of the feudal system as the feudal lords reign supreme at every level. — from the village to the federal cabinet as the parliament has some of the top feudal lords.

The ILO is seized with the issue and has protested time and again against it. The issue was discussed threadbare at a one - day seminar in Islamabad last week jointly sponsored by the ILO and the National Institute of Labour Training.

Pakistan is not only developing country where this evil practice persisted. It is something of a global phenomenon. Bonded labour abuses are also prevalent in the brick kiln industry, carpet industry and mining as well. It is an expression of one of the worst manifestations of poverty.

President Musharraf asked the rich nations of the world at the U.N. to eliminate poverty from the world. It is simultaneously his duty to check some of the worse forms of poverty in Pakistan or exploitation of the very poor by the very rich and politically powerful.

It is also the outcome of the forbiddingly high interest rate charged by the feudal lenders which multiplies the debt which the poor borrower can never pay in full on his meagre from wages. The system is heavily loaded against the borrowing haris. Developing countries have to eliminate such abuses while asking the rich counters to help them out of their poverty. Self-help is equally important and urgent.

In fact, such loans or advances appear to be more of a trap for enslaving the farmer and his family and not an act of assistance.

What is worse is the farmers living in the rural area tend to copy some of the wasteful ways of the feudal lords when it comes to marriages and other ceremonies and in the process finally get entrapped by him for life.

The perpetuation of the odious system with all its abuses is ensured by the inefficiency of the local officials, including the police and the law courts.

The feudal lords are too powerful or influential for the police and the district administration to interfere with it and it is not regarded politically judicious to try to disrupt the mainsprings of the local political order.

The feudal lords brush aside criticism of their system and its abuses, including bonder labour, as a matter of no consequence or an aberration of the city liberals.

The anti-bonded labour law act is not only law gathering debt in the pigeon holes of the Sindh Government but also many other welfare measures too have met with the same fate.

The ILO has come up with a declaration of fundamental principles and rights of work, which was adopted by the International Labour Conference in 1998, which is based on four core principles:

(1) freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining; (2) elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour; (3) abolition of child labour and (4) elimination of discrimination in respect of employment or equality of treatment in employment.

These principles are hardly implemented in Pakistan and least practiced in the textile sector. But, now the textile unions are joining together and forming a textile workers’ federation.

With the assistance of the ILO, Pakistan has published a compendium of studies in 10 sectors, covering bonded labour as well and will be the basis of programmes and policy initiatives in future.

It is rather easy to make new laws in respect of labour or prepare compendiums of laws already made or ILO principles, but what really matters is the full implementation in good faith and with real earnestness. In that, the Labour Ministry is sadly lacking or the labour minister does not want to annoy or upset the industries, investment or commerce minister.

Officials these days act only on priority areas and do not try to correct all the wrongs in society.

Bonded labour is one of the products of shortage of institutional credit in rural areas. The Agricultural Census of 2000 shows all households have a non-institutional credit of 64.5 per cent. But the non-institutional credit is generally believed to be availed by a larger number of persons. Like most official figures, these too seem to understate the reality.

However, micro credit for the low income groups is picking up and the agricultural credit target for the commercial banks for fiscal 2006 has been increased to Rs130 billion from Rs108 billion last year.

With micro-credit reaching out to the farmers and others in the rural areas, the incidence of bonded labour may be reduced. But the question of liberating those in bondage with their families will still remain unaddressed.