Just days after the Supreme Court declined to apply Article 23‘s forced labour protections to domestic workers, a different bench invoked the same provision to secure dignity for contractual teachers.On Wednesday (February 4), the Supreme Court delivered a judgement concerning thousands of contractual teachers in Uttar Pradesh that offers a masterclass in applying Article 23 of the constitution – the provision prohibiting forced labour and exploitation. Justices Pankaj Mithal and Prasanna B. Varale held that paying qualified teachers a stagnant honorarium of Rs 7,000 per month while barring them from seeking other employment constituted economic coercion amounting to begar, a form of forced labour explicitly prohibited by the constitution. The court expanded the understanding of what constitutes “force” under Article 23 beyond physical compulsion to include economic circumstances that leave workers with no meaningful choice.The timing is striking. Just days earlier, on January 29, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case concerning domestic workers’ rights but missed an opportunity to apply the same constitutional lens. The juxtaposition raises uncomfortable questions: why does Article 23’s protective umbrella extend robustly to government-employed teachers but not to India’s vast population of domestic workers, many of whom labour under conditions of even greater vulnerability and exploitation?The teachers’ case offers a template for how Article 23 should operate across employment contexts. Drawing on the landmark 1982 decision in People’s Union for Democratic Rights, the court explained that forced labour encompasses any work rendered unwillingly due to economic compulsion. When individuals are paid wages insufficient for survival and have no realistic alternatives, their consent to such terms is not truly voluntary – it is coerced by circumstances. The court noted that even contractual agreements cannot legitimise exploitation, as such contracts often reflect unequal bargaining power rather than free consent.Economic coercion as a constitutional violationThe Supreme Court’s analysis in the teachers’ case deserves attention for its unflinching characterisation of state conduct. The teachers had been hired in 2013 on eleven-month contracts at Rs 7,000 monthly. These contracts explicitly prohibited them from taking any other employment, part-time or full-time. When contracts were renewed year after year with the same fixed honorarium – occasionally nudged slightly higher only to be reduced again – the teachers found themselves trapped. They could not seek better opportunities elsewhere due to contractual restrictions, nor could they refuse the inadequate compensation due to economic necessity.The court described this as a “coercive cage”. By 2016-17, even unskilled daily wage labourers were entitled to minimum wages of Rs 7,214 per month. Paying qualified teachers with specialised training less than unskilled workers while simultaneously preventing them from supplementing their income created conditions the court deemed violative of constitutional guarantees. This was not merely administrative unfairness but forced labour disguised as contractual employment.Also read: ‘Fear Sold as Safety’: Domestic Workers’ Groups Slam Hiring Platforms, Seek RegulationWhat makes this reasoning particularly significant is its potential applicability to domestic workers, had the court chosen to apply it. Domestic workers across India routinely face similar conditions: wages below subsistence levels, restrictions on mobility and alternative employment, and economic circumstances that eliminate meaningful choice. Many live in their employers’ homes with limited freedom to leave or seek better terms. The asymmetry in bargaining power is even more pronounced than in the teachers’ case, yet constitutional protections seem more difficult to access.The fiction of contractual employmentThe judgment systematically dismantled the legal fiction that had been constructed around these teaching positions. The state had designated the teachers as part-time contractual employees to avoid granting permanent status and associated benefits. The court recognised this for what it was: exploitative mislabeling. Calling someone part-time while prohibiting them from working anywhere else is inherently contradictory. If employees cannot supplement their income through other work, they are functionally full-time regardless of designation.Moreover, after more than a decade of continuous service with year-on-year renewals, the court held that these positions had acquired permanency. The contracts had expired without formal renewal documents, meaning the teachers were no longer contractual employees in any legal sense. They had become permanent employees against posts that, though not formally sanctioned, were deemed created by the continuous nature of the work. The scheme itself required one instructor per hundred students, making these structurally necessary positions rather than temporary arrangements.This reasoning could revolutionise employment practices across sectors if applied consistently. Domestic workers often labour for the same employers for years or decades under the guise of informal or contractual arrangements. The fiction that such long-term, essential work is somehow temporary serves the same function as in the teachers’ case: denying workers security, benefits, and fair compensation. The constitutional analysis should logically extend to these situations, yet judicial intervention has been far less forthcoming.Institutional accountability and the pay-and-recover principleA crucial aspect of the judgment concerned financial responsibility. The Samagra Shiksha Scheme involves cost-sharing between Central and state governments in a 60:40 ratio. Uttar Pradesh argued it should not bear the entire burden of enhanced payments if the Centre failed to release funds. The court rejected this attempt to shift responsibility, holding that Section 7(5) of the Right to Education Act unequivocally makes state governments responsible for ensuring implementation regardless of Central funding delays.The court adopted a pay-and-recover principle: states must pay teachers their due compensation and subsequently recover the Central share from the Union government. Workers cannot be made to suffer for inter-governmental financial disputes. This principle has obvious applications beyond education. When constitutional rights are at stake – whether to education, dignity in employment, or freedom from exploitation – administrative or budgetary complications cannot justify violations.The court also clarified that the Project Approval Board, the national-level body with exclusive budgetary authority under the scheme, had approved Rs 17,000 per month for these teachers in 2017-18. Once proper institutional processes yielded this decision, state-level committees could not arbitrarily override it and pay lesser amounts citing financial constraints. This institutional clarity matters: it prevents governments from using bureaucratic complexity as cover for reducing already inadequate compensation.When cultural reverence meets material realityThe judgment opens with an unusual cultural framing, quoting Sanskrit verses that equate teachers with the divine trinity and place them at the pinnacle of societal respect. The court invoked these traditions not as mere rhetoric but to establish a moral framework against which the state’s conduct could be measured. The contrast was devastating: while teachers command reverence in cultural discourse, the state had reduced them to precarious workers earning less than minimum wage labourers.This technique – contrasting proclaimed values with actual treatment – could be powerfully applied to domestic work. Indian culture similarly venerates the sanctity of the home and the importance of care work. Yet domestic workers, predominantly women from marginalised communities, face conditions that belie any such respect. They work long hours in isolation, often without weekly rest, formal contracts, or recourse against exploitation. The gap between cultural rhetoric and material reality is, if anything, wider than in the teachers’ case.The wider significance of inconsistent applicationThe teachers’ judgment represents important progress in several respects. It pushes back against the casualization of government employment, particularly in essential services. It mandates periodic revision of compensation to prevent decade-long wage stagnation. It clarifies that constitutional values and human dignity must inform employment practices even when governments claim fiscal constraints. Most significantly, it demonstrates how Article 23 can function as a robust check against exploitation in employment relationships.Yet the judgment also highlights troubling inconsistencies in how constitutional protections are applied. Teachers employed by the state can access these protections through litigation, secure favourable judgments invoking forced labour prohibitions, and obtain enforceable relief. Domestic workers, despite facing comparable or worse conditions of economic coercion and restricted choice, have found the same constitutional door far harder to open.This disparity may reflect several factors: the greater organisation and visibility of teachers as a constituency, the clearer administrative framework governing their employment, or perhaps judicial comfort with intervening in government employment versus private household arrangements. Whatever the explanation, it creates a troubling hierarchy of constitutional protection based not on the severity of exploitation but on the identity and employment context of the exploited.A template for broader applicationThe value of this judgment lies partly in what it achieved for Uttar Pradesh’s teachers – ensuring they receive Rs 17,000 monthly with arrears going back to 2017-18. But its greater significance may be as a template for how Article 23 should operate across employment contexts. The court established that economic compulsion can constitute the “force” prohibited by the Constitution, that contractual consent does not legitimise exploitation, that stagnant wages violate dignity, and that workers cannot be trapped by restrictions on seeking alternative employment while being paid inadequately.These principles do not logically limit themselves to government-employed teachers. They should apply with equal force to domestic workers, agricultural labourers, and other vulnerable workers trapped in exploitative arrangements by economic necessity. The constitutional text makes no distinction between categories of forced labour. Article 23 prohibits “traffic in human beings and begar and other similar forms of forced labour” without qualification.The challenge now is ensuring that constitutional protections are applied consistently rather than selectively. When one bench of the Supreme Court can invoke Article 23 to secure dignity for teachers while another declines to extend the same analysis to domestic workers, it suggests the problem lies not in the constitutional framework but in judicial willingness to apply it uniformly. The teachers’ judgment shows the path forward. The question is whether India’s courts will take it.This is the third part of an analytical series on the domestic workers judgment. Read the first part here and second part here.