India's Booming Cities Are Being Built With 'Blood Bricks', Say Activists

Ponneri, India: When police raided the brick kiln in southern India where Siriya Banchor had been conned into a life of bonded labour - along with hundreds of other poor, illiterate migrants - the 48-year-old seemed more bewildered than relieved.

Fumbling in the darkness of a windowless mud-and-brick room she had shared with her family for more than two months, Banchor stuffed her things into a sack, took her child's hand and emerged into the bright glare of the afternoon sun.

"I have two sets of clothes, two utensils and a little rice. We came with nothing, hoping to earn enough to pay back our loan," she said, stepping over piles of half-baked bricks to join other rescued workers waiting to board trucks that would take them to temporary lodgings on the outskirts of Chennai.

In all, 564 brick kiln workers, including Banchor, were rescued earlier this month by police and local authorities acting on a tip-off from an employee at the kiln. It was one of the largest such operations in India - shedding light on the huge number of labourers trafficked into servicing the country's booming construction industry, activists say.

"The scale and magnitude of the problem is massive," said Chandan Kumar, founder of "Blood Bricks" - a campaign launched two years ago to expose abuses in the construction sector.

In Ponneri, about 50 km from the coastal city Chennai, rescued workers at the Sri Lakshmi Ganapathi Brick Industries brick kiln described how they were brought here two months ago by agents.

The workers, all from state of Odisha, said traffickers visited their villages, offering loans of Rs 20,000 rupees in exchange for six months labour.

The trafficker then sold the debt to another "agent" who brought them in batches by train to Chennai.

"The agents who come to our villages spot the families in distress. They know when there has been an unforeseen expenditure and then offer the loans," said one worker, a young, bare-chested man who followed his uncle to the kiln.

The labourers, along with their children, said they worked 10 hours daily, slept in tiny rooms with their familes, and had no access to clean water or toilets.

They were told they would be expected to work from January to June, before the monsoons usually strike, disrupting work.

Each family, some of them with elderly or pregnant women, was expected to produce at least 2,000 bricks daily. If they did not, money would be deducted from their loan.

They said they received no official documentation of the loan and did not know how much of the debt they had cleared.

A doctor working for the brick kiln owners, who was arrested along with five others, including site supervisors, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation he provided a steady supply of painkillers to ensure workers kept working.

India is home to almost half the world's 36 million slaves, according to the 2015 Global Slavery Index, produced by the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.

With India's towns and cities projected to swell by an additional 404 million people by 2050, demand for infrastructure and services will continue to be voracious.

"When a contract is awarded, it includes labour cost but not even one percent is put aside for their welfare," said PM Nair, who is chair professor and research coordinator on human trafficking at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.

There are no official figures on the number of people employed to cut, shape and bake clay-fired bricks mostly by hand in India's tens of thousands of brick kilns.

According to a 2015 paper by the Centre for Science and Environment at least 10 million people work in kilns, many located on the edge of towns and cities making them easily accessible for urban builders.