The political economy of unfree labour in South Asia

This paper by Jan Breman discusses the political economy of unfree labour in the context of South Asia by focusing on the issue of the debt bondage. He discusses the narrow definition used in India to describe the prevalence of bonded labour and provides a critique of the same. According to him the prevalence of bonded labour due to debt bondage could be not less than 10% of the working population that would work out to nearly 40 million people as of 2005. While his paper focused mainly on th...