Brick by Brick - Juhi Suklani
There goes the twelve-year-old child, underfed and unschooled, helping her mother carry bricks which will build my country's ambitious dreams. Her hunger, her mother's fear of the kiln owner, her father's enslavement — these are the building blocks which construct the house in which I live; the offices, factories or warehouses in which I work; the mall where I go to shop; the restaurants and cinema halls I visit for leisure; the many many development projects that will fuel urban growth across my land.
Specifically, this is what they are all built on:
Slave labour.
Inter-generational bondage.
Widespread child labour.
Human trafficking.
Violence and sexual exploitation by contractors and employers.
Cheating by agents.
Complete absence of health and safety norms
Severely underpaid and overworked manual labour.
It is absolutely astonishing how all of the worst aspects of unregulated manual labour in Asia come together in the making of bricks. Small wonder that analysts point out that India's urban boom is based on a modern form of slavery. Meanwhile, concerned NGOs carry out anti-bonded-labour campaigns with the slogan "blood bricks".
India is the second-biggest brick producer in the world, making nearly 250 billion bricks every year. There are approximately 200,000 brick kilns in the country, feeding the country's ever-expanding real estate and infrastructure development activities. An estimated 10-12 million workers — it is hard to get exact figures for this unorganised, un-unionised sector — keep the industry going.
The brick-making story in India is a saga of back-breaking daily work that may go on for as much as 12-16 hours. The work involves gathering and mixing clay, moulding and cutting bricks, transporting the dried bricks to the kiln, firing the kiln running, cleaning the ash.
Migrant workers — uprooted from their villages, unsupported in their new surroundings — live in shacks close to the kilns, with common toilets and no running water, often paid less than the legal minimum wages. These abysmal wages get reduced further in the name of a fine levied for spoiled bricks or a charge for using an electric bulb.
At its heart, this is a story of families, including young children, who are forced to work because the parents took an advance payment from an employment agent who was scouting for cheap labour in economically distressed villages, and who did not inform them of the consequences of the loan. Having migrated to a new and unfamiliar region, the family then works at appalling rates to pay back the loan and interest, even as they are forced to keep taking fresh advances for sheer survival. They never get out of the cycle. Children get involved in the work with their parents and parents take their help because they are paid per piece; more bricks mean more wages. School, hospitals, or leisure do not seem to belong to the brick-kiln planet.
Tragically, it is also the story of the vulnerable women who, forced into migration from their villages — or trafficked by agents under false promises — have to face sexual exploitation at the hand of contractors or kiln owners who hold them in bondage.
The brick kiln industry needs a big and continuous labour force but is utterly unregulated and neglected. The sector helps employers to behave cruelly, criminally and arbitrarily. Kiln owners routinely flout minimum wage laws. They may resort to violence to extract more work or to discipline non-compliant labour. They may increase the rate of interest on the loan given initially. They prefer migrant labour who are even more vulnerable than local labour. They prefer that whole families come to work for them since it reduces the chances of workers running away and often use tactics like keeping back a child when a parent goes to his or her village in off-season, to ensure their return.
Recognising the existence of such inhuman forced labour, India had outlawed bonded labour way back in 1976, under the Bonded Labour Slavery Abolition Act. In practice however, the practice persists in sectors such as agricultural, mining, match production, and brick kilns.
One of the most important reasons why a 'making visible' of these families and their work is crucial is that — though bricks are ubiquitous — brick kilns are located away from the space and imagination of those who could make interventions in their working. For instance, the unfair treatment of construction labour may still get periodic attention, since these workers are visible in cities and to a larger number of concerned citizens. But brick kilns only register momentarily as we pass by vast rural landscapes on speedy highways. If that.
In the midst of all the systematic unfairness, apathy, corruption and cruelty that allows such labour to persist, only the remarkable resilience of these workers' spirit and their attempts to keep going add beauty and dignity to images of brick labourers at work. Completely covered by dust or ashes, constantly rushing to produce more, these labourers are nevertheless women who try to carve out moments of friendship, mothers who keep an eye out for their young ones, fathers who try to feed their families, human beings who wonder about their future. And children who decide that broken bricks are toys...
Juhi Saklani
Juhi Saklani is a writer and photographer based in Delhi.
