Workers at India’s punishing brick-making kilns are ‘treated worse than slaves’, NGO report says
The kilns have become part of the underbelly of India’s economic miracle, producing building materials for the country’s offices, factories and call centres
Millions of Indian brick workers are trapped in bonded labour and regularly cheated out of their wages, an anti-slavery group said on Wednesday as it demanded government action.
A study by Anti-Slavery International in the northern state of Punjab said workers are often rescued by NGOs only to return to the kilns, needing back wages owed to them or lacking other opportunities.
There are an estimated 10 million workers toiling amid punishing heat and life-threatening pollution at tens of thousands of small-scale brick kilns in India.
We have found appalling levels of bonded labour and child labour ... young children are working for nine hours a day
The kilns have become part of the underbelly of India’s economic miracle, producing building materials for gleaming offices, factories and call centres sprouting up across the world’s seventh-largest economy.
Impoverished families are often forced to involve their children in hard labour since workers are paid by the number of bricks made.
The “Invisible Chains” report found 65 to 80 per cent of children under 14 working for an average of nine hours a day over the hot summer months.
“We have found appalling levels of bonded labour and child labour ... young children are working for nine hours a day in a dusty air filled with chemicals rather than going to school,” said Sara Mount, the group’s Asia programme manager.
“Often brick kiln workers are rescued from a situation of bonded labour in brick kilns in one season but then have little choice in the following season but to work in the brick kilns again.”