Ranchi – Child labour in Indian mica and cotton has been documented, audited and reported on for more than a decade. It persists, and the reason is structural rather than a failure of attention.
Investigations into cotton supply chains serving dozens of international buyers have found child labour, debt bondage and other indicators of forced labour. Studies of scrap mica in Jharkhand document unsafe conditions, exploitation, illegal child labour and trafficking.
Audits fail where the work is
A social audit inspects a facility. Both these supply chains begin outside any facility.
Scrap mica is collected from abandoned mines and forest floors by families, not employees. Cotton is picked on smallholdings by households where children work alongside parents. There is no gate to audit, no register to inspect and no employer to hold responsible.
A buyer can audit its tier one supplier rigorously and truthfully report clean findings, while the abuse sits three tiers upstream in a transaction nobody documented.
Debt bondage is the mechanism
Advances against future harvest or collection are how bonded labour operates in practice. A family takes credit at planting and repays in cotton at a price the lender sets. The debt rarely clears, and children work because the household cannot meet the obligation otherwise.
Enforcement against child labour alone removes the child from work and leaves the debt. Without addressing rural credit, the intervention makes the household poorer.
Why the pressure is rising now
European due diligence rules require buyers to identify and address harm in their chains rather than merely report on them, and the Responsible Mica Initiative targets eliminating child labour in Jharkhand and Bihar by 2030.
The measures that work are unexciting: functioning schools, household income support during harvest, and formal credit at rates that do not create bondage. None of them is a supply chain intervention, which is why supply chain interventions keep failing.
Source: Investigations into Indian cotton and mica supply chains, United States Department of Labor study on scrap mica in Jharkhand, and Responsible Mica Initiative commitments.
