Comment: ‘Right against exploitation’ under the Indian Constitution. (2003, 20 Marks)
Most Fundamental Rights restrain the state. Articles 23 and 24 also restrain society: they target begar, bondage, trafficking and child labour, relations of domination rooted in caste, debt and land. The right is therefore horizontal and transformative; its record shows both the Supreme Court’s reach and the limits of enforcement.
The Guarantee
- Article 23(1) prohibits traffic in human beings, begar (compulsory work without payment, historically exacted by landlords and officials) and “other similar forms of forced labour”; contravention is an offence punishable by law.
- Article 23(2) permits compulsory service for public purposes, such as conscription, provided the state does not discriminate on grounds only of religion, race, caste or class.
- Article 24 bars employment of children below fourteen in factories, mines or other hazardous work, complemented by Article 21A and Articles 39(e) and (f).
- With Articles 15(2) and 17, these clauses operate against private persons: the employer, contractor and moneylender are bound directly.
Judicial Expansion
| Case | Holding |
|---|---|
| People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India (1982), Asiad | P. N. Bhagwati read “force” to include economic compulsion: labour below the minimum wage is forced labour; contractors and the state as principal employer are both liable |
| Sanjit Roy v. State of Rajasthan (1983) | Famine-relief work paid below the minimum wage violates Article 23 |
| Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India (1984) | Faridabad quarries: bondage is presumed to arise from an advance; release must be followed by rehabilitation |
| M. C. Mehta v. State of Tamil Nadu (1996) | Sivakasi: offending employers pay ₹20,000 per child into a welfare fund; the state adds ₹5,000 or a job for an adult of the family |
The Asiad reading echoes Karl Marx‘s point in Capital that the silent compulsion of economic relations can bind as surely as the whip. Upendra Baxi called this social action litigation: letters became petitions and commissioners became the Court’s eyes.
Statutory Architecture
- Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976: bonded debts extinguished, district vigilance committees; a central rehabilitation scheme (2016, revised 2021) pays up to ₹3 lakh by degree of exploitation.
- Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, as amended in 2016: no employment below fourteen, no hazardous work for adolescents of fourteen to eighteen; India ratified ILO Conventions 138 and 182 in 2017.
- Trafficking: the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956; Section 370 IPC (2013), now Section 143 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023; the comprehensive Trafficking of Persons Bill 2018 lapsed in 2019.
The Gap between Guarantee and Reality
- Scale: Census 2011 counted about 10.1 million working children aged five to fourteen. Worldwide, the ILO–UNICEF estimate of June 2025 puts 138 million children in child labour in 2024, 54 million in hazardous work.
- Invisibility of bondage: about 3.1 lakh bonded labourers were officially identified and released between 1976 and 2018, against the Global Slavery Index (2023) estimate of 11 million Indians in modern slavery, a figure the government disputes.
- Design flaws: the 2016 family-enterprise exception covers home-based and caste-linked work where most child labour hides.
- Enforcement: vigilance committees exist largely on paper, identification rests with district officials close to employers, convictions are rare, and migrant brick-kiln workers fall between states.
Conclusion
Articles 23 and 24 are among the Constitution’s most radical clauses, carrying B. R. Ambedkar‘s insistence that political democracy needs social democracy beneath it. The Court turned them into a charter against economic coercion. The deficit is administrative and economic, not doctrinal: without wage security, universal schooling and an enacted trafficking law, the guarantee remains ahead of the reality it was written to change.