Dreams crash on banks of Balason

Here we look at how children working in stone crushing units of North Bengal do not figure in national child labour statistics

Don't want to miss the best from Business Standard?

Just days after Kailash Satyarthi won the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigns against child labour, photographs captured children with bare feet clearing waste from the Yamuna. In the fourth of a five-part series, we look at how children working in stone crushing units of North Bengal do not figure in national child labour statistics

Shyamal Baraman, 10, was eagerly waiting for the month-long Durga Puja vacation — not for soaking in the festive fervour. It’s the time when he earns most for his family by crushing stones on the banks of the Balason river, on the outskirts of Siliguri in North Bengal.

“There are holidays in school now. I can crush a full box of stones working through the day. On a regular day, I come to work only in the afternoon after school,” he says. A full box of stone chips, used for construction, fetches him Rs 42.

For Shyamal, Sadananda and Sushanta, all in the age group of 10 to 14 years, raja and rani are not fairy tales characters: They are names given to stones crushed by them.

“I can crush a raja patthar (king- sized stone) in four hours with a hammer, which alone will fill half a box,” says Sadananda, with a faint sense of pride. After all, he already has six years work experience. He shows blisters on his hand with moist eyes but recovers soon enough to point towards a government-run health centre on the riverside. “We get free medicines from there. It cures them in a few days,” he says.

In the Balason colony, about 10 km from Siliguri, there are 1,000 families living in slums alongside the bank of the river, who had mostly migrated from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) before 1971. Children from most of these families are involved in stone crushing, along with their parents.

According to Mehabub Ul Alam, a professor in North Bengal University (NBU) who has worked for the welfare of the colony’s residents for about three decades, “In the early 90s, there were about 500 families. Now, the number has doubled. The number of children involved in stone quarrying may have also gone up but awareness has been created in some way. At least, the children now go to school and they are not full-time workers, as was the case earlier.”

With constant awareness programmes from the government and local non-government organisations, parents send their children to schools, if not in the hope of a better future, but, at least, to ensure a meal under the mid-day meal scheme.

“No one wants their children to do this unless forced by necessity,” says Kiran Baraman, as she passes on some useful instructions to his 10-year-old son, learning to earn his livelihood as there is no mid-day meal during vacation.

Alam says since poverty is the main problem, his non-government organisation (NGO) tries to give vocational training to children and help them find a job. “The situation has improved a lot from what it was 20 years ago, with help from NGOs and the administration. There is still a long way to go for total eradication of child labour,” says Alam, founder-secretary of the Balason Society for Improved Environment.

Stone crushing mostly happens alongside the Balason and Chengi rivers. Stone chips available here are much cheaper than the black stone chips found in Pakur, Jharkhand. There are middlemen who supply labourers to persons who has mining leases.

Child labour here takes place in a clandestine manner, which explains why laws alone can’t eradicate this problem. “We employ local men and women for crushing stones. The workers bring their children along to help in their work. We know employing children for such work can land us into trouble,” says a middleman.

According to Md Rizwan, joint labour commissioner of West Bengal government, who is in-charge of North Bengal, whenever child labour is reported, the victims are rescued and sent to residential homes and the employers are fined Rs 20,000 according to the law.

According to the 2011 Census, India has 4.35 million child labourers between five and 14 years of age and West Bengal accounts for nearly seven per cent of that number. The Shyamals and Sadanandas working in these areas do not figure in these statistics.