After the National Human Rights Commission flagged 84 cases of bonded labour across Haryana, state officials today told the NHRC that none of these cases could be detected when inspection teams were sent to the ground for checks.This position was taken by all district magistrates of Haryana who attended a virtual meeting convened by the NHRC to review the flagged bonded labour cases. Present also in the meeting was the Haryana Chief Secretary and top state officials of the labour department.Speaking exclusively to The Tribune after the meeting, NHRC Chairperson Justice V Ramasubramanian (Retd) said the commission had now decided to issue a detailed advisory to Haryana and all other states on how to change the existing government approach to the detection of bonded labour.”We had called a virtual meeting with Haryana officials after we found their previous responses to the matter unsatisfactory. When we received these 84 complaints of bonded labour mostly across Haryana’s brick kilns, we issued notices to district magistrates concerned. They wrote back saying they could not find any case of bonded labour in the state in their inspections. We were not satisfied with the replies and so this virtual meeting was called today. All DMs attended and all stuck to their previous stand that no case of bonded labour could be found in Haryana upon ground inspection,” Justice Ramasubramanian said.NHRC said Haryana officials, however, admitted that inspection teams were not constituted with independent witnesses — a requirement under the SOPs. The commission has now decided to issue a detailed advisory to Haryana and all other states to follow proper standard operating procedures in the matter of constituting inspection teams to assess bonded labour cases.“We will also say in the advisory that the inspectors should tally production volumes on site with the number of workers registered at the unit being inspected. If the volumes are high and worker numbers are low there is a clear presumption of bonded labour because there is a mismatch,” Justice Ramasubramanian said.He said the commission had recently conducted a similar meeting on bonded labour status in UP which is the worst hit with 216 cases. After Haryana, the NHRC will also review bonded labour cases of Punjab.The Chairperson lamented that while it has been 50 years since India enacted The Bonded System Abolition Act in 1976, the practice is still prevalent and state governments are still finding it difficult to detect.Justice Ramasubramanian said at the Haryana meeting today, the abolition of bonded labour was one segment where all three pillars of democracy have intervened — Parliament has enacted laws, judiciary has passed orders and executive has issued standard operating procedures.