Soomer Bheel, of the low Bheel subcaste, is one of the few literate residents of Azad Nagar. Out of respect, he is called Soomer Bhagat; in the South Asian religion of Sikhism, bhagats are holy men or devotees. A Hindu, Bhagat remembers being constantly afraid of forcible conversion to Islam by the guards and contractors hired to watch the workers. “It is a common threat,” he says, “and there is nothing that peasant men can do other than trying not to provoke the cruel oppressors.”

Explaining the accumulation of debt that makes it impossible for bonded laborers to buy their freedom, he says, “If the zameendar lends us 50,000 rupees, he would write down 150,000 in their accounts sheet. If we are given 20 kilograms of wheat to cook our chapaatis, the accounts would mention 60 kilograms. For our medical emergencies, if we are give 200 rupees and sent to local doctors recommended by the lords, the sheet would have the figure of 500 as the medical loan.”

Ninety-year-old Hamzio Babar, from one of the three Muslim families in the colony, was trapped in a cycle of debt that on paper totaled 150,000 rupees, or about $1,460. In an effort to free the 12 members of his family, he had to sell half his cattle to pay off the police and hire a lawyer. Now he and his wife, Nazam, are free, but too old and frail to work.

A Human Rights Watch report from 1995 on bonded laborers in Pakistan explains the historic dealings between the peasants and the landlords: “These relationships are reinforced by contemporary agricultural policies which give landlords privileged access to land, resources, and credit. In many cases peasant children inherit the debt, and thus the working conditions, of their parents.”

Denied credit by banks, landless laborers rely on zameendars to extend them loans for basic necessities, which quickly spiral into debt bondage. “Failed harvests, common occurrences in Pakistan, often result in such limited options for economic survival that peasants must literally mortgage themselves to a landlord,” says the HRW report.

Faisal Siddiqi, a renowned human-rights lawyer who has fought high-profile cases of “hard-core bonded labor” in Sindh, says that the absence of sufficient legal aid is a major obstacle in fighting slavery in Pakistan. “There has hardly been any case where landlords or their hired goons have been punished for keeping laborers under bondage, raping of peasant women … And the lack of effective legal recourse and aid to the poor, which is a general issue in the country, is not in the reach of bonded laborers. The courts need to resist such systematic persecution.”

But the rehabilitation of people who have only known oppression is not easy, says Karamat Ali, executive director of Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research. “Most of the political leaders in the Parliament and the top decision-making positions in the mainstream political parties still come from a feudal and landed background; they are heavily biased against the abolition of bondage despite the existence of constitutional provisions, laws and institutional provisions against its existence.”