At the country’s back-breaking brick kilns

In India, brick kilns are among the most gruelling and exploitative work sites. Extremely poor families, many from Adivasi communities, usually migrate to these kilns for six months of the year. There they live in makeshift huts and toil in the blistering heat carrying huge loads. The income this brings is their modest buffer for the rest of the year, when they labour in fields or elsewhere. Often, work at the kiln is a form of bonded labour and the families must make a specific (and huge) number of bricks to pay off the advance taken from contractors. These are PARI stories of brick kiln workers in Maharashtra, Odisha and Telangana