The Right Against Exploitation

In one line

A man who agrees to work for less than the law says he must be paid has not really agreed to anything, because hunger left him nothing to agree to, and the Constitution treats his work as forced labour.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: articles 23 and 24 form the right against exploitation, and both bind private persons as well as the State. Article 23(1) prohibits traffic in human beings, begar and other similar forms of forced labour, and makes contravention an offence. "Begar" is labour exacted without any remuneration, but the article is not confined to it: "Every form of forced labour, 'begar' or otherwise, is within the inhibition of Article 23", and it makes no difference whether the person forced to give his labour is remunerated. "Force" includes "compulsion arising from hunger and poverty, want and destitution", so payment below the statutory minimum wage makes the labour forced. Article 24 forbids employing any child below fourteen in a factory or mine or in any other hazardous employment, and operates of its own force whether or not Parliament legislates.

Why the law has this at all

Most fundamental rights are addressed to the State, because the drafters expected the danger to come from government. Articles 23 and 24 assume the opposite. The practices they name, bonded labour, begar exacted by a landlord, children in a match factory, are not things a government does. They are things people do to other people, and the State's failure is a failure to stop them.

That is why both are written as flat prohibitions rather than as restraints on State power, and why article 23(1) makes a contravention "an offence punishable in accordance with law". It is also why the same question recurs in every case here: the wrong was done by a contractor or a quarry owner, so what is the State doing in the writ petition? Because when a right enforceable against private persons is violated, the State is constitutionally obliged to interdict the violation.

The provisions

Article 23 is headed Prohibition of traffic in human beings and forced labour. Clause (1): "Traffic in human beings and begar and other similar forms of forced labour are prohibited and any contravention of this provision shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law." Clause (2): "Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from imposing compulsory service for public purposes, and in imposing such service the State shall not make any discrimination on grounds only of religion, race, caste or class or any of them."

Article 24, headed Prohibition of employment of children in factories, etc., reads: "No child below the age of fourteen years shall be employed to work in any factory or mine or engaged in any other hazardous employment."