Kavi is not a name that rings across boardrooms. Nor is Sushmitha’s. Yet, they are the cogs spinning the engine of India’s soaring economic dreams, dreams that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has boldly pitched to the world, vowing to transform India into a $5 trillion economy, up from $3.5 trillion in 2023.

But beneath the glitter of global investor summits and “ease of doing business” rankings lies a brutal, buried truth. Ravi and millions like him – factory hands, contract workers, shrimp peelers and so many more – power this growth with their sweat, often trapped in conditions the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO) categorizes as forced labour. The façade of progress is held up by a disturbing reality: no contracts, no rights, and often, no way out.

From Farm to Furnace, and Back Into the Fire
Kavi works in a steel mill. The Factories Act of 1948, a decades-old legislation governing working conditions, mandates paid leave for anyone employed over 240 days a year. But for Kavi, every day off, whether for illness or accident, is a day unpaid. There are no weekends. Seven-day weeks. Thirty-day months. The official declaration of Sunday as a holiday for labourers, passed in 1890, is a distant joke.

His factory, like many others in India’s industrial belts, does not provide salary slips. There’s no transparency on how much is deducted or why. A few days of absence can get a worker’s entry card deactivated, an unofficial firing. Return to work, and the same worker is treated as “new,” losing out on any accumulated benefits like provident funds or end-of-service compensation.

In short: disappear for three days, and your job is reborn, but sadly you aren’t. You’ve been erased, reset, and rehired without rights.

And yet, Kavi keeps returning. Why?

Because unpaid wages are held hostage  –  both by companies and by middlemen. Walking away means walking away from money already earned. His desperation is monetized.

There’s more. Kavi, and others in his factory cluster, say they’ve never received written contracts. Without them, they have no legal proof of employment, no rights to negotiate or contest, and no safety net.

A 2025 study published in the Indian Journal of Legal Review confirms that such contract-less, opaque employment is rampant, particularly among migrant and female workers, leading to widespread wage theft, hazardous conditions, and systemic coercion.

I Have a Job – Contract or No Contract. That’s What Matters
In Kakinada, a port town hugging India’s eastern coast, 47-year-old Sushmitha peels shrimp bound for supermarket shelves in the United States. She earns less than Kavi. No contract. No job security. Hired by a local woman who acts as a recruiter, Sushmitha’s work supports a billion-dollar export industry, India shipped $2.7 billion worth of shrimp to the U.S. in 2023-24.

And yet, her only “gear” is a pair of gloves and a cap, not for her protection, but to protect the shrimp. Her pay depends on how many kilos she peels. Her earnings – about $4.50 a day – are handed over in cash, without receipts or wage slips. Like Kavi, she has no legal recourse. What’s owed to her could be anything. Or nothing.

She works through menstrual pain. She takes only one 30-minute break. She cannot afford to ask questions.

As a divorced mother of two, still paying off wedding loans and school fees while buying her cancer-stricken mother’s medication, Sushmitha doesn’t have the luxury of protest. “If I get thrown out, what then?” she says, her voice more resigned than angry.

That single line illustrates India’s informal sector crisis – a sprawling, unprotected workforce estimated to be over 90% of all employed people in the country. A nation sprinting toward global superpower status is still shackling its workers in the chains of desperation and silence.

Unlike veteran labourer Sumitha, who has long surrendered to the harsh terms of her job, 23-year-old Ninnu is still finding her footing in the cold, cruel maze of India’s seafood industry, an industry that fuels export dollars but drains the dignity of its workers.

Ninnu hails from the poverty-stricken villages of Odisha. At 19, with her family drowning in debt after her sisters’ marriages, she did what millions of India’s young migrants do: she left. Lured by the promise of a stable income, she was recruited by an agent – a word that has become synonymous with modern-day bondage – and sent off to work in a shrimp processing unit inside the high-security zone of Krishnapatnam Port in Nellore, 500km south of Kakinada.

Here, the idea of freedom is rationed like rice in a ration card. Ninnu and other migrant workers are allowed outside the heavily surveilled facility just once a week – for three hours – to pick up essentials from a nearby village. That’s when Ninnu rushes through the crowded lanes of Muthukur, buying sanitary pads and snacks like a fugitive on parole.

“I was forced by poverty,” she says bluntly. Her voice does not tremble. It is trained by circumstance. “We know we’re being exploited… But what else can we do? We adjust and keep going.”

Ninnu earns about $110 a month – a pittance for standing long hours peeling shrimp, often without fair compensation for overtime. Most of her day unfolds under the cold gaze of CCTV cameras. Every move is watched. Every minute is monitored. There is no contract, no health insurance, no grievance redressal system. It is a job, yes – but one that resembles captivity far more than employment.

“It feels like an open prison,” she says.

The Illusion of Inclusion
Ninnu’s story isn’t a footnote in India’s labour crisis.

Labour rights experts say her ordeal is demonstrative of a systemic failure – a broken chain of enforcement, apathy, and institutional neglect that allows forced labour to flourish. From missing contracts to unpaid overtime and restricted movement, every detail of Ninnu’s life points to a calculated model of suppression.

It’s not random but structured, not unfortunate, it’s profitable! And it thrives in a country that proudly sells its “demographic dividend” to global investors.

In March 2025, India’s Labour Minister Shobha Karandlaje told Parliament that approximately 307 million unorganised workers, including migrants, have been registered under a national government scheme. On paper, it sounds like progress.

But researchers argue the number is an undercount, a mirage dressed in official data. The real size of India’s informal workforce could be far greater. And unlike the billion-dollar shrimp that get shipped to supermarkets in the U.S., workers like Ninnu remain undocumented, underpaid, and invisible.

A Nation Built on ‘Invisible Chains’?

India’s growth story may be splashed across Davos brochures and investor decks, but beneath the varnished headlines lies a disturbing truth, one that is hidden in plain sight. It’s not just a labour problem but a systemic exploitation on an industrial scale; and it is everywhere.

According to the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), India’s workforce stands at a staggering 470 million. Of this, only about 80 million are employed in the “organised sector.” The remaining 390 million – larger than the population of the United States – toil in the unorganised, unregulated shadows of the Indian economy.

And as Benoy Peter, executive director at Kerala-based Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID), rightly points out: “Many of them are not just unorganised, they are unprotected, unseen, and forcibly silenced.”

The International Labour Organization’s (ILO) 2024 India Employment Report backs this grim assessment: a full 90 percent of India’s workforce is “informally employed.” Not just informal, often indentured.

Despite India ratifying the ILO Forced Labour Convention in 1954 and abolishing bonded labour through the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976, the country remains home to the highest number of people living in modern slavery. A damning Walk Free Foundation report places the figure at 11.05 million — eight in every 1,000 Indians.

And yet, the reality may be even darker. In 2016, then Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya estimated 18.4 million bonded labourers across India. The government ambitiously pledged to rescue and rehabilitate them by 2030. Fast forward to 2021 – when MP Mohammad Jawed sought an update in Parliament, the government confessed: only around 12,000 had been rescued and rehabilitated in five years.

That’s 0.065 percent of the problem addressed.

Let that sink in.

The Fashionable Face of Slavery
Among the worst offenders sits one of India’s most lucrative export industries – textiles and apparel.

In 2024 alone, Tamil Nadu (the southern textile powerhouse) led India’s exports in garments and handicrafts, clocking in at $7.1 billion, followed closely by Gujarat at $5.7 billion. But behind the glossy sheen of fabric lies a machinery powered by coercion, silence, and fear.

Thivya Rakini, president of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU), has spent a decade inside these factories. She’s witnessed, time and again, indicators that align disturbingly well with the ILO’s definition of forced labour — intimidation, withheld wages, excessive overtime, sexual harassment, physical abuse for missing quotas.

“It’s not random,” she says. “It’s wired into the supply chain. When international fashion brands demand bulk at speed and pay suppliers next to nothing, what do you think happens downstream? Exploitation becomes the business model.”

With 45 million workers in India’s textile industry and 3.5 million in handlooms alone the rot is deep. Women, who constitute 60 to 80 percent of this workforce, bear the brunt. Underpaid compared to men, often hired without contracts, they face gendered violence, caste-based discrimination, and are routinely denied the right to unionise or speak out.

Many are Dalits, migrants, or single mothers, groups with the least social power in India’s rigid hierarchy. For them, a missed day’s wage could mean hunger. A protest could mean permanent blacklisting.

Cotton Fields of Despair
The plague of forced labour isn’t confined to factories.

In 2022, Transparentem, a human rights watchdog, launched an investigation into 90 cotton farms in Madhya Pradesh, India’s heartland. The report, released in January 2025, was chilling. It uncovered child labour, hazardous work conditions, and the blatant use of forced labour, including children handling pesticides without any protection.

So while cotton from these farms makes its way into our global supply chains, the clothes we wear, the sheets we sleep on, the children who pick it often go to bed hungry, coughing from chemicals.

When India consolidated 29 central labour laws into four new labour codes between 2019 and 2020, the government pitched it as a bold step towards simplifying complex statutes, boosting compliance, and enhancing worker welfare. On paper, it was reform wrapped in efficiency – cutting down more than 1,200 compliance provisions to just 479.

But years later, the much-hyped overhaul remains mostly in limbo – drafted, but not delivered. Despite multiple state governments preparing rules, there has been no uniform nationwide implementation. The result? A vacuum – where confusion reigns and worker protections are steadily eroded.

A Double-Edged Code
Supporters of the new labour codes argue they bring India’s archaic laws into the 21st century – codifying rights, enabling digital compliance, and attracting investment. But trade unions and labour rights advocates are unconvinced. In their eyes, these codes represent a sly shift of power – away from the worker, toward the employer.

Take the redefinition of union formation, for instance. Under the older Trade Unions Act of 1926, just seven workers could form a union. Now, under the new codes, the threshold has been raised dramatically, a minimum of 10 percent of the workforce or 100 workers, whichever is lower, is required. This isn’t reform. It’s regulatory obstruction.

Santosh Poonia from India Labour Line, a helpline offering legal aid and mediation for informal sector workers, calls it what it is: “A calculated dilution of collective bargaining rights.”

“When you can’t form a union, you can’t negotiate. And when you can’t negotiate, you are forced to accept exploitation,” he says.

‘Ease of Exploitation’?
Sanjay Ghose, a senior labour lawyer at the Indian Supreme Court, goes a step further – challenging not the intent of the codes, but the execution. “The laws may be new, but the rot is old. The state’s failure to implement protections effectively is what leaves workers wide open to abuse,” he warns.

And with job creation stagnating, the problem deepens. Ghose points to a telling indicator – IIT placements.

The Indian Institutes of Technology, long a symbol of India’s academic excellence and a global talent factory, are witnessing a troubling slide. Placement rates have dropped by 10 percentage points since 2021. COVID-19 may have triggered the plunge, but India’s economic recovery has been patchy at best.

“Even the brightest graduates are struggling to find work,” Ghose notes. “So imagine what it’s like for an average worker with limited skills. The desperation is real — and that desperation is being harvested to fuel the economy.”

Growth Without Jobs, Reform Without Rights
This is the new paradox of India – GDP numbers rising, but job security crumbling. Pramod Kumar, former senior adviser to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), explains why. He says national growth is now increasingly dependent on government expenditure, because private investment and FDI have dried up.

The data speaks for itself:

–Private sector investment fell to 11.2% of GDP in FY24 — the lowest in three years, and below the pre-pandemic average of 11.8%.

–Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) dropped 5.6% year-on-year, to $10.9 billion in Q3 FY24, driven by a volatile global economic climate.

In such an environment, job creation is increasingly skewed towards the informal and precarious, where legal safeguards are either non-existent or unenforceable.

Poonia doesn’t mince words. “The government claims it will rescue 18 million bonded labourers by 2030. But with these reforms, I see the opposite happening. When ‘ease of doing business’ trumps human dignity, exploitation becomes inevitable.”

The Last Bit, India’s Labour Future

The promise of labour reform was never meant to be this, a euphemism for deregulation, union busting, and unchecked employer leverage. What India needed was inclusive formalisation – bringing informal workers into the legal fold, offering social security, healthcare, grievance redressal, and the right to organise.

What it got instead was a thinly veiled rollback of worker protections, masked by the language of modernity and global competitiveness.

India is hurtling toward its $5 trillion ambition, but it risks leaving its most essential contributors – the workers – behind, unseen and unheard.

Because when laws become easier for businesses but harder for workers, ‘ease of doing business’ quietly becomes ease of doing exploitation.

And that is not progress. It’s regression wearing a corporate tie.

The Price of a $5 Trillion Fantasy
This isn’t just a humanitarian crisis; it’s a national contradiction.

India cannot claim moral leadership in the global South while violating the most basic rights of its own labour force. It cannot build a $5 trillion economy on the broken backs of women who peel shrimp under surveillance, men who smelt steel without contracts, children who wield pesticides, and garment workers slapped for not stitching fast enough.

What India calls “unorganised,” the world must call out for what it often is: state-enabled exploitation, packaged in GDP growth.

Until the government stops treating its informal sector as a statistical afterthought, until global brands take responsibility for the lives buried beneath their bottom lines, and until we acknowledge that forced labour is not an exception but a pillar of India’s economic structure – this $5 trillion dream is just that: a delusion, built on the blood and sweat of the nameless.

And no amount of spin can wash that stain clean.