How child labour in India makes the paving stones beneath our feet | Child labour | The Guardian

Despite promises of reform, exploitation remains endemic in India’s sandstone industry, with children doing dangerous work for low pay – often to decorate driveways and gardens thousands of miles away

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.

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.

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.

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.

As awareness of modern slavery and trafficking has grown, some countries have passed laws to protect against exploitation of workers. In 2015, the UK passed the Modern Slavery Act, which requires companies with a global turnover of more than £36m to publish a statement every year outlining how they are addressing slavery, including child labour, in their supply chains. But the way the industry works makes it extremely hard to trace shipments of stone back to the mine they came from, or even the area. Sandstone slabs extracted from mines are usually sent to processing centres close to urban areas, and from there, warehoused near transport hubs until they are shipped overseas. “It is very difficult for you to pinpoint which stone is going to which country,” said Madhavan Pillai, an independent journalist and researcher focusing on labour issues. “They have created a lot of layers.”

Some private companies have worked with governments, trade unions and NGOs, such as the Ethical Trading Initiative, to develop programmes that claim to identify and eliminate human trafficking and modern slavery in supply chains. As a result of these efforts, several mine-operating groups in Rajasthan banished children from the mines, and many companies selling stone from India now include anti-slavery declarations on their websites. But my own research has shown that these cleanup efforts have not gone far enough.

During my five-month investigation, I found that many mining businesses are still using child labour. Some had devised a creative workaround for employing children: instead of sending children to the mines, trucks would drop heaps of stone on roadsides close to the children’s homes. I visited five mining villages in Rajasthan, and spoke with dozens of adult and child workers, all of whom shared a similar story of low pay, exploitation and injury. Sonu and his friends, all under 10 years old, are hammering stones instead of going to school. It seems the sandstone paving blocks so beloved of architects and landscape gardeners may still be the fruit of child labour.

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.

Today, the hill has been levelled. The migrants who arrived to work in the mines have been joined by their families – there are more than 4,000 people living in Budhpura now – but the village isn’t an active mining area any more. The global demand for sandstone for construction and decorative paving has been so extensive that Budhpura’s stocks have been seriously depleted. After the bigger pieces of stone have been taken out, what’s left are broken rocks, or quarry waste.

About two decades ago, when mining operations began to exhaust the extractable sandstone reserves near Budhpura and its neighbouring villages, mining and processing businesses started dumping the waste on the sides of the highway that connects the region to other cities. Here, workers – mostly children, women and older people – would sit all day, turning the waste into cobbles for a rupee per stone. Given the meagre pay, this work was only undertaken by those who couldn’t find work inside the mines, said Rana Sengupta, the CEO of the Mine Labour Protection Campaign Trust, a nonprofit in Rajasthan. “[The businesses] didn’t consider it an illegal thing,” he told me.

Today, all around the village, sandstone waste – lumps of tan and grey rocks and rubble – lies in heaps. It’s hard to find a patch of vacant land that isn’t occupied by piles of dusty stone, or stacked with wooden crates of cobbles waiting to be loaded on to trucks. The crates are unlabelled, and the trucks bear no insignia that would tell the workers who they work for, or the destination of the products of their labour. I asked Munna, who now makes cobblestones, if he knew the name of the company he works for. “We don’t know about the company, but we always hear that [the sandstone] goes to foreign countries,” he said. About 40 other workers told me something similar. The supply chains are long and complex, and hard to monitor.

On a hot afternoon last summer, about 20 women sat in an open area where the hill once stood, working in groups on batches of stones. One of the women, taking shelter from the blazing sun under a tattered umbrella, placed a thin metal plate on top of a sandstone block and drew around its edges to get a near-perfect white rectangle. Then, using a chisel and hammer, she started chopping away around the rectangle, producing a smaller block.

The stonecutters are hired – on a shift by shift basis, without contracts – by local agents. These agents report to, or trade with, processing businesses in a largely informal market, less regulated than the mines. The industry is also heavily tainted by the “mining mafia”, local gangs and agents operating illegally on behalf of mining companies that enjoy political backing and legal protections.

In 2005, Pillai, the journalist and researcher, compiled a widely circulated report that focused on labour issues. Since then, there has been growing pressure on global businesses to check whether there was child labour in their operations. “Some European and British companies visited after the report and saw that [child labour] was a very common practice. They said they wouldn’t buy the stones,” Sengupta said.

One such company was Marshalls, a British supplier of hard landscaping and building materials. In December 2006, the company sent its then marketing director Chris Harrop to tour Rajasthan’s mining villages, and he reported being “appalled” by the scale of child labour. Marshalls joined the Ethical Trading Initiative, which, with help from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, helped establish the Sustainability Forum on Natural Stones, a local nonprofit that works on human rights issues, particularly child labour, in supply chains. In 2019, Harrop was awarded an OBE for services to the prevention of modern slavery.

However, when I visited Budhpura last year, I found out that the problem was very far from solved.

Following Pillai’s report, stories appeared in the media about working conditions in the mines, and local mining operations made changes to their working practices. But these changes did not solve the problem; they merely relocated it.

Pillai, who has visited some of these villages several times in the past two decades, told me that businesses used to employ children directly inside the mines, or in workshops. But now, “the entire village has become a workshop,” he said. The stones are dumped outside people’s homes, on intersections, close to where the workers live. “They have turned it into a kind of cottage industry, [where] it becomes easy for them to say that we don’t force [them to work], children just do it [on their own].”

Anita and Sonu now walk a few hundred metres down their street and they find their pile of stones waiting for them. A tractor routinely dumps the rubble. They work under the eye of a supervisor, who counts the finished cobbles, and then the tractor returns to collect them. An adult worker can make somewhere between 100 and 150 stones in a day, for which they are paid about 3,500 rupees (£33) a month.

My investigation into five villages in Rajasthan’s Bundi and Bhilwara districts found that in every one, stones were dumped in a similar fashion around workers’ homes, where children worked alongside their mothers. In India, it’s illegal for children under 14 to be employed in hazardous occupations such as mining. So the stones, the workers say, come with an injunction: don’t tell anyone about the children.

On my first day in Budhpura last year, workers hid their children even before I could speak with them: one of them later confessed that they had seen my car. On another day, as I travelled through the villages on a motorbike, young boys and girls started running away when they saw me. When I finally sat down with workers one afternoon, outside someone’s home in a sequestered corner of a mining village, they told me that they had been advised by the local agents not to speak with me.

Dilip Singh, the president of the Rajasthan Barad Khan Mazdoor Sangh, a union of mine workers, said that many mine leaseholders still employ children inside the quarries. Others only employ adult workers, but sell their waste to a processing business that hires child workers to make stones outside the mines. “It allows them to refrain from directly employing children,” Singh said – but still to profit from child labour.

Akshaydeep Mathur, the secretary general of the Federation of Mining Associations of Rajasthan, an organisation representing the interests of mining companies in Rajasthan, said that most mines follow the rules, but acknowledged that processing businesses may have started dumping stones around workers’ homes to avoid scrutiny. However, he added that most companies use machines to cut stones these days and are less likely to need manual labour. Besides, he said, children are not strong enough to do this work. He acknowledged that “there may be some 14- to 18-year-old children who help their parents at the end of the day,” but said that their numbers are low, “less than 2%”. He also said that businesses pay a minimum of 700 rupees as daily wage to workers. If any able-bodied person makes less than that – which was the case for all the workers I spoke to – he said they are “either not good or not working eight hours a day”.

Between September 2023 and January 2024, I sent emails and text messages, and made dozens of phone calls to government bodies responsible for the protection of children’s rights. None offered a meaningful response. The labour department of Rajasthan asked me to speak with India’s labour ministry in New Delhi – which did not respond to my calls – while one of Rajasthan’s Child Welfare Committees and the Rajasthan Directorate for Child Rights either did not respond or declined to talk about the situation.

In response to my findings, Emma Crates, business and human rights manager at Marshalls – which is no longer a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative – noted that the challenges facing the industry are constantly changing, which means the company must continue to evolve. “In 2006, we restricted our Indian natural stone supply chain in order to source from a single, direct supplier. This decision was taken to enable us to build a closer working relationship with that supplier, and ease the rollout of strict protocols, including zero tolerance of child labour.

“We are always looking to develop our strategy, which includes continuing with international site visits from Marshalls staff, and bringing in more independent third-party audits,” she said in an email.

A long white line runs across the back of 14-year-old Amar’s hand, which he got from the jagged edge of a stone. Beside it are two scars, marks of the time when his hammer missed its target and sliced into his hand instead. Injuries like these are so common among cobblestone workers of all ages that they hardly expect any medical support from employers for such “minor accidents”.

Amar avoided work for as long as he could. But he is the oldest child in his family, and when his father got silicosis, he had to start bringing in money. Silicosis is a fatal lung disease characterised by shortness of breath and a cough. It is caused by prolonged exposure to fine silica particles found in sand, quartz and rocks. Sometime before her husband’s death four years ago, when the respiratory illness confined him to bed, Amar’s mother, Sumitra, took a loan that was too big for her to repay while taking care of a sick husband and six children. That’s when Amar, then aged 10, quit school and started work. The 80 rupees he now makes every day doesn’t do much to pay the bills (or repay the debt), but it’s better than nothing.

More than 11 million people living in India have been exposed to silicosis-causing dust. Until a few years ago, silicosis was typically misdiagnosed as tuberculosis, because the two diseases have very similar symptoms. This largely left workers to deal with the illness without employers’ or government support. In Budhpura, I was told, many workers don’t seek treatment for illness or injury, because of the cost of travelling to a hospital. It costs 2,000 rupees to get to Kota, the nearest city. “People simply drop dead if they can’t afford it,” one stonecutter told me.

One way to reduce the amount of dust produced by mining is by wet drilling, where water is applied to the stone through the drill as it works. In 1961, the Indian government ruled that wet drilling would be mandatory in mining operations, but this has not been implemented widely. Activists have also called for workers to be provided with protective gear, such as masks, gloves and helmets. But the people I spoke to told me that that hasn’t happened. “Mask? They can’t even get us drinking water,” one female stonecutter, who lives in Budhpura, told me. Besides, a mask makes it hard for them to work in the hot climate; temperatures in Rajasthan can reach over 45C in the summer.

Budhpura has been called the “village of widows” in some media reports, because of how many men have been killed by silicosis. These widows are raising their children on their own, forced to work in the same industry that killed their husbands. And they take their infants to work. Before they sit down to beat the stones, they sometimes thrust two rods into the ground nearby and tie up a cloth between them to act as a crib for the baby.

Mathur, from the Federation of Mining Associations, told me that fears about silicosis are “blown out of proportion”. He claims that international lobbies have been using misleading and old data to hurt the business interests of the country’s mining industry. He agrees that wet drilling can bring down the risk of respiratory illnesses, and that many companies are adopting it. But doing so isn’t always possible. “At some places there is a shortage of water,” he told me. He also argued that responsibility for preventing silicosis lies with the processing industry, which turns sandstone into different products such as paving blocks. “Processing is a separate industry altogether. You might say silicosis is coming from mining. But it’s coming from the processing industry.”

In 2019, following years of struggle by workers and activists, Rajasthan became the first Indian state to launch a comprehensive policy offering aid to silicosis patients. The state government now provides 300,000 rupees (around £2,800) for treatment that alleviates the silicosis patient’s symptoms, and an additional sum of about 200,000 rupees (£1,900) to their family after death. But most of the amount paid to the bereaved family members, workers say, is spent on their own medical treatments and debt repayment, which offers them little opportunity to move away from the industry and look for healthier jobs. “The cost of human life is only 500,000 rupees,” fumed Shankar Singh, the activist.

As I sat with Amar’s mother, overlooking the hills of depleting sandstone in front of us, I asked her if her son ever complains about having to work. “He does, of course. But what can I do? My hands are tied. We need food on the table,” she said.

The sound of metal striking on a stone in the distance filled the air as a young child in front of us played with his toy trucks and tractors. “Our husbands used to do this work,” she said. “They got silicosis. We’ll eventually get it too. And so will our children.”

At about 1pm, Pooja comes back from school; it takes her 30 minutes by foot to get to her village of Dhaneshwar, about 20km away from Budhpura. Then there are household chores. By 2pm, she is with her mother, crouched down around a pile of stones with a hammer and chisel. For the next four hours, Pooja makes cobblestones, usually about 50 of them. Pooja, who is 14, wants to be a doctor. Her tests were approaching when we met, so she was putting in extra hours after dinner, which is when she usually sits down to do homework.

Pooja’s father died of silicosis in 2014. She is well aware that it’s going to be an uphill battle to study medicine. Her mother knows it, too. “But against all odds, I am still sending her to school,” her mother said, pride in her voice. She hopes that her daughter can continue in school at least until she turns 16, even though she will have to work at stonecutting after hours.

Many children work in conditions that are “hell on earth”, according to Colin Gonsalves, a senior lawyer at India’s supreme court and the founder of the Human Rights Law Network in New Delhi. India’s Child Labour Act is simply not being enforced, he told me. He blames corruption among labour officers and negligence in the judiciary, as well as Narendra Modi’s government’s aggressive focus on economic progress.

One way to eliminate child labour, some activists say, is to raise the parents’ income. “If you don’t pay [adult workers] the right amount, people will be forced to bring children to the mines,” said Sengupta, the labour campaigner. Yet there is little sign that there will be major wage reform any time soon. Gonsalves said that the only solution here is to take legal action. “Nothing else will work. If you litigate and get a good judge, something may change,” he said.

Many of the workers I met told me that they would quit this work if they could. But they have no other means of support. Shutting down the cobble business would take away many of the workers’ only possible source of income. Agriculture is not an alternative for them. “Who [owns] land here? We are all migrants,” Munna said.

“There’s no other thing in this village, except these stones,” another worker added.

Instead, some of them told me, they want better protective measures such as housing and healthcare. “Shut the cobble business down only if you have another job for us,” another said.

A local activist pointed out that even if they were able to convince local mining and processing businesses to improve conditions, and to spend money on building playgrounds and education centres, it would not solve the problem. The businesses’ costs would go up, and so would their prices. “And when they go to the marketplace, they see the Whites buying from companies that offer the lowest prices. What do you do then?”

Amar dreams of playing cricket someday. Sonu, however, wants to be a doctor like Pooja. He misses going to school, he told me, but it’s expensive and far away. He does hope, though, that he and his friends could catch up for a session of cricket someday. But now he needs to get back to work, where he will beat, pound and craft cobblestones in the heat of Rajasthan for at least four more hours.

The names of the stone workers have been changed. This article was produced with the support of the Journalism Centre on Global Trafficking

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