This Working Paper on the incidence and patterns of bonded labour in India was commissioned as an input to the ILO Director-General’s second global report on forced labor, entitled A global alliance against forced labor, prepared for the 93rd session of the International Labour Conference in June 2005.it aims to enrich the debate on bonded labor and its eradication in India by capturing some of the main trends over recent years. It aims essentially to compile and assess the contemporary evidence on bonded labor that has appeared in secondary sources.