How child labour in India makes the paving stones beneath our feet
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-yearold, 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 northwest, 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 cofounder 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 mineoperating 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.
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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.