How child labour in India makes the paving stones beneath our feet

Sonu and Anita: Working in the Stone Industry

Sonu has one clear instruction from his boss: when you see an outsider, run. In the two years since he started working full time, he has had to run only twice. Sonu is eight years old. His mother, Anita, said that almost every time an outsider comes to their village of Budhpura, in the Indian state of Rajasthan, she receives a phone call telling her not to bring Sonu to work. “Only adults go to work on those days,” said the 40-year-old, cradling her youngest child, who is three.

Working Conditions and Exploitation

Sonu and his mother work eight hours a day, usually six days a week, making small paving stones, many of which are exported to the UK, North America and Europe. Sonu began working after his father died of the lung disease silicosis in 2021. “First, he made five stones, then 10, and then he quit school to work full-time,” his mother said. The pair sit on a street close to their home, amid heaps of sandstone rubble, chiselling rocks into rough cubes of rugged stone. Sonu is paid one rupee – less than a penny – for each cobblestone he produces. These stones have a retail value of about £80 a square metre in the UK.

Twenty years of chipping away with hammer and chisel, tossing and turning the hefty rocks, has left Anita with constant back pain, and countless injuries to her hands and feet. She has tuberculosis, which may have been caused by inhaling dust. She can’t hold a hot chapati because her hands are raw and peeling from grasping the stones and handling tools for hours at a stretch. Her income is so small that she has to decide between paying for a doctor or buying clothes and shoes for her five children. When we met last year, in the hot month of August, Sonu was walking barefoot on the stony, unpaved roads of the village.

The Stone Industry in Rajasthan

India is one of the largest producers of natural stone, including granite, marble, sandstone and slate. Rajasthan, a mineral-rich state in the north-west, attracts mining companies from all over the country. Before a business can begin extracting, it must acquire a mine lease from the state government. Rajasthan has issued more than 33,000 mine leases, more than any other state in India – most of them for sandstone mines and quarries – but reports from environmental organisations suggest there are thousands of other quarries operating illegally, without a licence. This means a significant proportion of the Rajasthan mining industry is unregulated.

Sandstone, one of Rajasthan’s top exports, is a coloured sedimentary rock, mainly composed of quartz sand, which is used in construction and paving. In 2020, Rajasthan produced about 27m tonnes. And while a large part of it is for domestic use, hard-wearing sandstone paving is popular in Europe and North America for roads that see a lot of snowfall or heavy vehicles. The biggest consumer of Indian sandstone, though, is the UK. The stone’s combination of patterns and colours – red, tan, brown, grey or white – give an attractive, rustic appearance to garden paths and patios. Although sandstone is produced in Scotland and Cumbria, Indian sandstone is cheaper: in 2021-2022, the UK imported more than 350,000 tonnes of it, worth about £65m.

Exploitation and Child Labor

Reports suggest there are around 2.5 million people working in Rajasthan’s mining industry, the majority of them migrants from marginalised communities elsewhere in India. Some travel to Rajasthan independently, looking for work, but many of them have been recruited from other Indian states by local agents working for or with mining businesses. “The agents tell [the workers] you will work on contracts, make a lot of money,” said Shankar Singh, a social activist and co-founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, an organisation supporting agricultural workers and labourers in Rajasthan. Singh claimed the migrant workers have very little knowledge of the work they are being hired for, or the risks involved. “If they tell them how dangerous the job is, why would anyone take it?” One 2005 report detailed how agents invited migrant workers to Rajasthan on a free trip to Hindu religious sites; when they couldn’t pay the travel expenses, they were forced to work in the quarries.

The Stone Industry in Budhpura

Five decades ago, Budhpura was little more than a sandstone-rich hill with a cluster of underground mines, with a few migrant workers living in shanty ­towns nearby. Munna was one of the workers who came to live on that hill in the 1960s, spending most of his days in the mine, hand-cutting the sandstone and making slabs. It was hot and dusty work, and the pay was terrible. “It was very difficult,” he recalled.

theguardian.com

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