The long read: 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
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
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.
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.
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 a month.
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.
In 2019, following years of struggle by workers and activists, Rajasthan became the first Indian state to launch a comprehensiveoffering aid to silicosis patients. The state government now provides 300,000 rupees for treatment that alleviates the silicosis patient’s symptoms, and an additional sum of about 200,000 rupees to their family after death.
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