E-waste to textiles: Forced labour in India has deep roots

In Seelampur, northeast Delhi, the tools of childhood are not crayons and books, but pliers and wire-strippers. The place is India’s largest e-waste market. Children as young as eight work here, picking apart old phones and laptops with their bare hands in hazardous conditions.

They earn about Rs 200 daily, according to a report by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. Children are employed because their smaller hands and low wages are useful to someone else, and there are many such Seelampurs across the country.

India amended its Foreign Trade Policy on July 14 to prohibit the import of goods produced, wholly or partly, through forced labour. The amendment comes at a time when the United States is examining forced labour practices in 60 countries, including India.

According to the International Labour Organization’s Forced Labour Convention, 1930, “forced labour” means all work or service exacted from a person under menace of penalty, and for which that person has not offered himself voluntarily.

For years, sexual exploitation was a primary driver of trafficking in India. Data shows that the nature of trafficking has changed. Between 2019 and 2022, the share of trafficking cases driven by labour exploitation nearly tripled, from 17.8 per cent to 49.8 per cent. Over the same period, the share attributed to sexual exploitation barely moved (chart 1, click image for interactive link).

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, the total number of forced labour victims nearly tripled from 1,141 in 2019 to 3,335 in 2022, then fell over the next two years, with 1,493 victims reported in 2024.

Children accounted for more than one in six forced labour victims in 2019. The share rose sharply in the post-pandemic years, reaching over one in four victims in 2021, before easing back to just above one in ten by 2024, still a concerning 12.29 per cent of total victims.

Women comprised 56.35 per cent of forced labour victims in 2022, but the share declined to under 6 per cent later. Men accounted for around 80 per cent of forced labour victims between 2019 and 2024, except for two consecutive post-pandemic years. Women accounted for 5.99 per cent and men 81.72 per cent of forced labour victims in 2024, the latest year for which data is available (chart 2).

Delhi recorded the highest number of forced labour victims in 2019 and 2023. Odisha reported zero victims in 2019 before accounting for the majority of cases over the next three years, followed by a decline in 2023 and 2024 (chart 3).

States may reshuffle year to year, but the goods made by forced labour remain consistent. The US Bureau of International Labor Affairs’ 2024 list of Indian goods bears this out. A few core products — bricks, hybrid cottonseed, embellished textiles, garments, and rice — consistently appear on lists for both forced and child labour. Each sits deep inside informal, subcontracted export supply chains, where cost pressure is passed down to the most vulnerable.