Negotiating Objectives for a Free Trade Agreement with India

Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

I thank the committee for its report and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for her introduction. Like other noble Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity for increased trade with India, which can of course benefit both countries, and I have huge respect for India, in particular the resilience of its people. But like all countries, including our own, India has many ills and injustices that have to be recognised and challenged, and some of them have potential links with trade and trade agreements. One of the Government’s negotiating objectives reads

“Reaffirm commitments to international labour standards”.


By itself this is much too vague and general, which the International Agreements Committee rightly picks up on. In paragraph 89, for example, it says:

“India clearly has weaker labour laws than the UK. Witnesses noted … labour abuses in tea supply chains, including forced labour, failure to pay the minimum wage, gender discrimination and suppression of freedom of association”.


The injustice that is particularly relevant to trade and our desire to increase it, on which I want to focus, is bonded labour. This persists in India as well as in other countries in south-east Asia. During the summer we had a vivid example of this cruelty, not in fact from India but from Indonesia. As noble Lords may have read, workers were flown in to help pick fruit on our farms. They had to pay £5,000 fares for their flights and were subject to many other deductions, with their houses in Indonesia pledged as security. The result was that they were trapped in debt and likely to take very little, if anything, home. I am glad to say that the Indonesian Government are looking into this.

In India, this kind of debt bondage is all too prevalent. According to the 2016 world slavery index, there are 19 million Indians in some form of slavery, many of them in debt bondage. We know that the vast majority of these people in some form of slavery are from the scheduled castes, especially the Dalits—the former untouchables. According to Anti-Slavery International, this amounts to 90% of them. When Dalits try to exercise their rights or resist abuse and exploitation, they are faced with extremely hostile and sometimes brutal resistance by the dominant-caste villagers who uphold the hierarchy. Consequently, when Dalits resist their oppression they risk complete boycott, cutting them off from land use, access to markets and employment.

As we might guess, bonded labour is particularly prominent in the agricultural sector, where 64% of the population work. This is especially linked to caste and caste structures, which are deeply entrenched in rural areas. The reality is that landlords are of high caste, small landowners are of lower castes, and the landless and bonded labourers are almost exclusively Dalits. Bonded labour is also present in the brickmaking and mining industries. Women also suffer in multiple ways: patriarchal systems confine women to certain types of occupations such as domestic work, silk farming, carpet making and weaving. Young girls are commonly recruited to work in spinning mills in India in return for the cost of their marriage or a dowry payment. The parents often wait several years before receiving the money, which is usually less than initially agreed upon.

All this is illegal. Forced and bonded labour are contemporary forms of slavery, and as such are prohibited under international law—law from the United Nations and many conventions from the ILO. I could cite many of them, but I will not do so because of time. The point is that the law is in place and has been strongly reiterated in recent years, particularly in relation to bonded labour. India itself has signed up to all but two of the ILO protocols and conventions, but the practice still goes on. Lack of implementation of the legislative frameworks, failure of the authorities to observe the laws and the impunity of perpetrators are the most common obstacles to eliminating forced and bonded labour in India.

This is where the British Government and British importers have a key role to play. They can take steps to ensure that any goods that are imported were not produced as a result of bonded labour or any other form of slavery. This can make a difference, as we see with child labour. The report Sowing Hope examined child labour and wages in cotton and vegetable seed production in India. It demonstrated that children under 14 years old account for more than 18% of the workforce in the cotton seed farms surveyed. More than 50% of the child labourers in the sector are Dalits or Adivasis, and the majority of child labourers do not attend school.

Although still too high, the total amount of child labourers has in fact declined since 2015 due to initiatives by companies and NGOs. The report finds that wages across the sector are still far from the minimum wage, a figure that has not significantly improved, and that Dalits are still treated far worse than others, but in the 613 sample farms surveyed there was a direct correlation between the decline of child labour in companies that have implemented special programmes to address this issue, compared to those that have not yet tackled the problem. That shows that companies can have a real effect, so I strongly agree with the scrutiny report and its recommendation in paragraph 92 that

“The Government should either seek to strengthen labour protections informally, through co-operation mechanisms established in the trade deal, or formally, by requiring minimum levels of protection. It should discuss options with stakeholders, including development organisations and trade unions.”


I urge the British Government to insist in the final form of this trade deal that all companies importing goods from India or exporting to Indian markets sign up to the forced labour protocol of the ILO. Companies should also be obliged to map and disclose suppliers, sub-suppliers and business partners in their whole value chains. This trade deal provides a good opportunity not just to increase trade, but to ensure that the agreements that are made play their role in eliminating the horrible practice of bonded labour. The Government have a key role in ensuring that companies do this.