Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US

Section 27 of the Indian Contract Act clearly says one sided contracts are void. Most contracts in these companies are one sided in nature and of the type - if you quit, then you pay X but if we fire you then we do not pay anything. The Supreme Court of India has clarified this Superintendence Company Of India ... vs Krishan Murgai on 9 May, 1980 [0].

In fact, Section 383 of the Indian Penal Code even makes the illegal to use the common coercive tactics by firms (TCS in the article) to withhold documents [1]. The tactic amounts to "extortion" and carries a punishment of 3 years of prison or fine or both [2]

TL;DR - Bonds are illegal and so is the practice of withholding ANY valuable to enforce vulnerability. The latter is a criminal offense.

[0] http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1186410/

[1] http://indiankanoon.org/doc/262864/

[2] http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1944660/

The law doesn't seem to be doing much to protect the millions (perhaps as many as ten million) of people in bonded labour.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27486450

> India's economy is the 10th largest in the world, but millions of the country's workers are thought to be held in conditions little better than slavery. [...]

> "There are deep-rooted problems of business-related human rights abuse in India," says Peter Frankental, Economic Relations Programme Director of Amnesty International UK. "Much of that involves the way business is conducted, an unwillingness to enforce laws against companies, and fabricated charges and false imprisonment against activists who try to bring these issues to light."

http://www.antislavery.org/english/what_we_do/programme_and_...

> In India, our work focused on freeing the millions of men, women and children forced to work as bonded labourers. Regardless of their age, they work long hours labouring in quarries, brick kilns, agriculture and as domestics, receiving little or no pay in return for a loan needed for survival.

http://idsn.org/caste-discrimination/key-issues/bonded-labou...

> In spite of the encompassing and seemingly progressive legislative framework, the use and abuse of Dalit bonded labourers in India remains endemic within a range of occupations and branches, both rural and urban, such as agriculture, forestry, fishing, domestic work, and cleaning. A report by Anti-Slavery International in 2008, revealed that dalit bonded labourers are employed to carry out the most physically straining and menial types of work in industries such as silk farms, rice mills, salt pans, fisheries, quarries and mines, tea and spice farming, brick-kilns, textile and domestic work(2).

"The guy at XYZZY will ask about hash tables, so..." and I'd ask them questions about something else, like concurrency, to very obvious consternation. Halfway through an interview, one candidate even asked when I was going to ask about hash tables.

"Fine. We can talk about concurrency and hash tables."

There was an undercurrent of expectation. Their handler / manager (the relationship was never really made clear) called me one day and said "We expect you to give a job to several of our people. You keep changing your questions. What is the problem?" And I would explain that I wasn't going to hire someone junior, who we would have to teach how to do engineering, for a senior wage.

Eventually they stopped coming, presumably having found better pastures.

the [contracting] company pays a cheap price.