Eradicating Bonded Labour in India: The Impact of the Majboor Kisko Bola Campaign

Bonded labour – a form of modern-day slavery where a person is forced to work against a debt they can never repay – remains one of India’s most persistent human rights violations. Despite the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976, the practice has not disappeared. It has simply transformed. According to the International Labour Organization, while older feudal forms of agrarian bondage have declined, new forms have taken root in the informal economy – particularly among migrant workers lured by labour contractors with advance payments and false promises. The Walk Free Foundation estimates that India has the highest number of people in modern slavery globally, with over 11 million individuals affected. Against this backdrop, the Majboor Kisko Bola campaign stands out as a bold, media-driven attempt to fight this exploitation at the grassroots level – using the humble radio to reach people in places where even newspapers had never arrived.

What is “Majboor Kisko Bola”?
Why radio – and why it worked
The power of narrative in behaviour change
Listener clubs: turning broadcast into dialogue
Shrota Samwad: taking it to the authorities
NGO collaboration and the Project Advisory Committee
Measured impact – and honest limitations
Why this campaign matters for development communication

What is “Majboor Kisko Bola”?

Majboor Kisko Bola translates literally as “Who are you calling helpless!” – a defiant name that carries the entire philosophy of the campaign within it. Launched by BBC Media Action, the international development charity of the BBC, the programme was a radio-based initiative focused on bonded labour, labour welfare, human rights, and social equity. It initially targeted vulnerable communities across the central Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh, and later extended to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. According to India Development Review, the project was funded by the Google Foundation and was specifically designed to reach listeners in “media-dark” communities – villages with no television, no newspapers, and sometimes no electricity at all – across more than 110 villages.

The campaign name was not incidental. It was a provocation. It challenged both the exploitation suffered by bonded workers and the passive acceptance of that exploitation by the broader society. The question – who exactly is helpless here? – pushed listeners to recognise that the system, not the individual, was the problem.

Why radio – and why it worked

In remote, low-literacy areas of central and northern India, radio is not a relic – it is still the most accessible and trusted medium. Television requires electricity and money. Print media requires literacy. But a battery-powered radio can reach a farmworker, a brick kiln labourer, or a migrant on the move. As HuffPost reported, trained organizers from partner NGOs would travel to small villages in high-migration districts specifically to play the weekly MKB radio programme, making it the only reliable source of rights-based information those communities had ever received.

The programme’s content was deliberately accessible. Each episode covered topics including the legal definition of bonded labour, the Bonded Labour Abolition Act, safe migration practices, human trafficking, collective bargaining of rights, minimum wages, and the role of NGOs and government agencies. Critically, it delivered this information not as dry legal text, but through storytelling – real accounts of people who had been trapped in bondage and found a way out.

The power of narrative in behaviour change

One of MKB’s defining features was its use of real human stories rather than statistics. Consider the story of Manki, documented by Bandhua 1947, a national advocacy campaign working on bonded labour. Manki had been lured to work in Bangalore, where he and his fellow labourers were confined and refused permission to leave. When he finally managed to escape to return to his ailing mother, he came home to a village that had been regularly listening to MKB. Armed with the information from the programme, the village organised themselves. Within a week, the remaining labourers were rescued and brought home – and with police intervention, they received their full wages. As Manki put it, he and his villagers no longer felt majboor (helpless); they felt informed, and more confident of their bargaining power.

This is exactly what development communication theory argues: behaviour change is rarely triggered by facts alone. It requires emotional resonance, identification with characters in similar situations, and a sense that change is possible. MKB delivered all three.

Listener clubs: turning broadcast into dialogue

Broadcasting was only one half of the strategy. The other half was community organisation. In Jharkhand’s Khunti district alone, listener groups were formed in 15 villages in the Murhu block. After each episode, these groups gathered to discuss what they had heard – sharing personal experiences, asking questions, and working through what the content meant for their own lives. The impact was concrete: villagers began reporting missing children to police stations, leaving destination addresses and contact numbers when going out for work, and speaking up about labour violations they had previously stayed silent about.

The listener club model was critical because it converted a passive audience into active participants. People were not just receiving information – they were processing it together, in a trusted community setting, and translating it into action. This participatory approach is consistent with what development communication scholars call the community mobilisation model, where media acts as a catalyst for collective problem-solving rather than a one-way information channel.

Shrota Samwad: taking it to the authorities

As the campaign evolved, BBC Media Action introduced a third layer: the Shrota Samwad – literally, “Listeners’ Dialogue.” These were large-scale public events that brought MKB listeners face-to-face with district officials – including district magistrates, labour commissioners, and local police – in a forum where grievances could be registered and acted upon directly. Unlike ceremonial government visits where officials deliver speeches and leave, the Shrota Samwad was a genuine exchange. Listeners came forward, often for the first time, to articulate their complaints publicly.

The results were significant. According to India Development Review, over 5,000 official grievances were registered with district authorities at these events. At one Samwad in Panna, Madhya Pradesh alone, more than 800 listeners attended, and 600 registered formal complaints with the Labour Commissioner’s office. Officials pledged on-the-spot action on issues ranging from unpaid minimum wages and lack of safety equipment to cases of unlawful confinement and physical harm.

NGO collaboration and the Project Advisory Committee

The campaign was never designed to work in isolation. BBC Media Action partnered with a network of local NGOs across the project states, recognising that effective development communication requires ground-level trust and implementation capacity that an outside broadcaster cannot provide on its own. These NGO partners played the crucial role of translating the campaign’s messages into actionable steps – helping workers identify legal resources, providing rehabilitation assistance, and mobilising local authorities against exploitative employers.

To guide the campaign’s direction and ensure it remained contextually appropriate, a Project Advisory Committee (PAC) was established. The PAC brought together experts, activists, and community leaders whose insights helped tailor the campaign’s messaging to the specific cultural, caste-related, and regional realities of each state. This structure was essential: bonded labour in Jharkhand, for instance, often intersected with human trafficking, while in Madhya Pradesh it was more closely tied to migration and debt. As the campaign blog noted, local journalists trained through the programme also contributed field reporting on these different dimensions, strengthening both media coverage and community awareness simultaneously.

Additionally, organisations like Samarthan, a civil society organisation working in high-migration districts of Madhya Pradesh, worked as facilitators – acting as the crucial link between the anti-slavery initiative and communities in the most marginalised, media-dark areas. Their outreach ensured the programme reached people no broadcaster could reach alone.

Measured impact – and honest limitations

The campaign produced measurable outcomes. Data published via India Development Review showed that 37% of MKB listeners had a clear understanding of the legal definition of bonded labour, compared to just 7% of non-listeners. 62% of listeners could identify at least three labour rights violations, versus 32% of non-listeners. And 61% of listeners said they would actively encourage others to fight for their rights, compared to 47% of those who had not been exposed to the programme. Separately, it has been reported that more than 3,000 people applied for minimum wages as a result of the programme, and increased media reporting generated by trained journalists led to 200 people being freed from bonded labour.

However, the campaign also confronted hard structural realities. Ground reporting by the Daily Pioneer found that in areas like Latehar and Khunti in Jharkhand, many bonded labourers admitted to atrocities in private but would not speak up on radio or in public forums. The reason was simple: they still had to live in those communities and work for those employers. Caste hierarchies and fear of retaliation from powerful local intermediaries – known as dabangs – remained formidable barriers. As one senior NGO official in Jharkhand observed, awareness alone does not break a feudal system; it takes courage, which requires safety, which requires systemic change beyond what any single media campaign can deliver.

This tension – between information-based empowerment and structural economic and social power – is not a failure of the MKB campaign specifically. It is the central challenge of all development communication in deeply unequal societies. The campaign was clear-eyed about this. As BBC Media Action’s own reflection in IDR noted, the project’s adaptive programming approach meant that when they realised listeners needed more than awareness – they needed a direct channel to authorities – they created the Shrota Samwad. It is this willingness to evolve that marks MKB as a serious, not merely symbolic, intervention.

Why this campaign matters for development communication

The Majboor Kisko Bola campaign is a textbook case – in the best sense – of what development communication can and cannot do. It demonstrates how media campaigns, when designed with deep contextual understanding, genuine community participation, and adaptable implementation, can shift knowledge, attitudes, and even behaviour at scale. BBC Media Action, as an international development charity that works in over 35 countries, brought organisational credibility and technical expertise. But the campaign’s real strength came from embedding that expertise in local structures – listener clubs, local NGOs, journalist training, and Shrota Samwads – that gave communities ownership over the process.

At the same time, MKB is honest testimony that media campaigns cannot replace policy enforcement, economic reform, or caste-based structural change. India’s bonded labour problem is rooted in poverty, informal employment, and social hierarchy – problems that no radio show, however well-designed, can fully resolve. What it can do is light a path: raise awareness, build confidence, connect people with resources, and create pressure on authorities to act. MKB did all of this, and that is not a small thing.

What do you think? Can a radio-based awareness campaign be enough to challenge deeply rooted systems like bonded labour, or does meaningful change require stronger political and economic intervention alongside it? And in an age of smartphones and social media, how can campaigns like MKB adapt their model to reach newer generations of vulnerable workers in media-dark areas?

References

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Table of Contents

What is “Majboor Kisko Bola”? 🔗

Why radio – and why it worked 🔗

The power of narrative in behaviour change 🔗

Listener clubs: turning broadcast into dialogue 🔗

Shrota Samwad: taking it to the authorities 🔗

NGO collaboration and the Project Advisory Committee 🔗

Measured impact – and honest limitations 🔗

Why this campaign matters for development communication 🔗