July 10, 2003

Children working in the glass bangle industry suffer deprivation, writes Zofeen T. Ebrahim

Bent double, as close to the flame as possible, bangle in one hand and a long thin glass stick in the other, Shumaila, 15, sits on the floor in a small back room of their two-room house, with all windows and doors closed.

Slowly, and with slightly unsure hands, she makes a floral pattern with the long glass stick on the glass bangle. “I’m not very good with murai (decorating the bangles), not as good as my sisters who have been doing it for much longer,” she stops and wipes the stream of sweat trickling down her forehead. Her back is also drenched. Shumaila is able to decorate six dozen bangles in a day, which can get her Rs16.24. She’s been doing this work now for four years. “All we are able to make is Rs742 a week,” says her older sister.

“The work is fine, although I get tired after sitting in one position for too long, but it’s the heat that makes me dizzy. It burns my eyes.” I point to some burn marks on her fingers. “For these I put mehndi and that eases the pain.

Having only studied till the fifth grade, she had to be taken out of school to help feed the many mouths — they are 11 in all — nine children and two parents. “We start work at nine in the morning uptil one when we break for lunch, and then we start again at four and work till ten.” In between she helps with household chores too, like wiping floors, washing clothes and dusting etc.

When does she go out with friends? “I’m not allowed to go out, my brothers don’t let me, but I can visit friends at their home. We sit and chat or play Ludo. When I was young we played running-catching. I like to play with the skipping rope too.”

In the evening, however, she takes an hour off to watch the various Indian soaps she’s hooked to, shown on the foreign television channel. “We have cable at home,” she says with pride.

It’s Ana’s eyes that transfix you. Big, soulful eyes that are really too big, but that’s not all, they look so grieved. She’s 12 but looks not more than six or seven and is all bones.

Initially she refuses to talk to me but when I cajole her she says, “I hate this bangle-making work. It’s like sitting in an oven and I often burn my hands. I like to go to school, I have friends there,” she does jorai (welding the two edges of a bangle together).

“She’s got typhoid,” says her mother who has five other children. “This is the third time that she’s had a relapse.” After work and after housework, she, like Shumaila, likes to go into the make-believe, bold and the beautiful world of Indian soap operas.

Munir, 13, one of the youngest bangle cutters, has earned and saved some money from working in the glass bangle-making factory, and plans to buy a bicycle. “I’ll be the first one in my community to have a bicycle and that too from my own money,” he says excitedly.

He has already collected Rs1450 and needs another Rs450 before he will be able to buy a bicycle. He earns Rs100 a day and gets his wages every fortnight. “My uncle collects them for me and gives them to my mother.”

Munir works in a glass bangle-making factory in Hyderabad where he cuts the long, cylindrical glass spring with a cutting file, counts to make a tora (which makes 300 bangles) before it can go to various houses for sadai and jorai.

While the process appears deceptively simple, it requires patience and skill. Many times the glass will cut the skin of the bangle cutters and one can see Munir wearing a masking tape around his forefinger.

He starts work at seven in the morning and gets off by three or four in the afternoon. “I live in Tando Mohammad and it takes me an hour by bus to get here.” Once home, he sleeps off the day’s toil, gets up to eat and then goes back to sleep for the night. “I take two days off in a month.”

Munir has few allusions and fewer dreams about what he wants to be. “I’ll probably stick to doing what I’m doing. It’s easy, I’ve learnt it well since I started two years back and am at home with the people I work with.” And school? “I don’t want to,” he says adamantly. He expresses no regrets at not having attended school, or any desire to enroll in one if given a chance.

Save the Children-UK conducted a study on the prevalence of child labour within the Glass Bangle Industry (GBI) in Hyderabad, Pakistan. “The intent was not to eradicate child labour from this industry, but to explore the root causes and understand the plight of the children involved,” says Jiwan Das, programme manager at SC-UK’s Child Labour and Emergencies.

He concedes that while the work itself is not life threatening, it is hazardous in a number of ways if you go by the International Labour Organization (ILO) definition. “It takes place in confined spaces; is conducted in an unhealthy environment with exposure to dangerous substances; involves working in difficult conditions for long hours; involves residing at the site of the work with little personal free time and, offers no form of preliminary safety training.”

The key findings of the study are that “there is an increased prevalence of children in the GBI and for many this labour starts at a very young age and continues even after adulthood.”

The reason identified is “poverty that leaves few options for the family other than for the children to lend a hand in income generation.” The study also points out that “eradication of this labour is not a viable option unless new avenues and opportunities are created”.

One major impediment is that an alternative form of work is negligible or doesn’t pay as well. Saima, now 22, who started work at the age of seven, is a matriculate. “I can teach at a local school, and of course it is more appealing, but the wages are low.”

Unlike others Saima presents a different scenario. Her family places no restriction on girls getting education. In fact, girls are encouraged. Instead, financial constraints and lack of opportunities in the area, has resulted in educated girls returning to this mundane home-based work.

The study found three localities, namely, Hali Road, Ilyasabad and Latifabad Unit No. 11 with the highest concentration of glass bangle work. From the 509 households surveyed, about 73 per cent of children were involved with bangle-making in one form or another.

These trends reveal a confoundingly high percentage (90 per cent) of child labour among the communities in both Hali Road and Latifabad area, as opposed to a remarkably lower percentage at Ilyasabad at only 56 per cent.

While the level of poverty is more or less the same in all the three localities, the low percentage of child labour observed, particularly in the bangle-making industry in Ilyasabad, says the report, could be attributed to child labour diverted towards alternative vocations like working as motor mechanics, salespersons in shops, waiters in hotels or being self employed.

The survey reveals that the concentration of the bangle work is carried out within the confines of the home with the number of workshops comparatively minuscule.

According to the survey, there are some 26 factories both run mechanically and manually and some 42 baking facilities in the project areas. A total of 627 children were interviewed whose average age was twelve years and though picked at random, resulted in seventy-nine per cent of the interviewees being girls and twenty-one per cent boys.

The process of sadai involves aligning the cut in the bangle by placing it over a flame, while the process of jorai involves welding the bangle together. For fuel, either natural gas or kerosene oil is used and to keep the flame alive fans cannot be used.

The already polluted environment is further aggravated since cross ventilation is considerably poor. The involvement of children (both girls and boys), at this stage of bangle making was seen to be the highest as the process is home-based, and allows children to be actively involved, while still remaining under the care of the parents.

The current wage for sadai and jorai is Re1.68 and Rs3 per tora respectively. In a day, an individual may complete anywhere from 25 to 35 toras depending on the speed and the number of hours put in.

“In order to carry out the task one must sit in a crouched position for long hours and be exposed to an open flame. The cuts in the bangles being small along with the glare of the open flame, causes a strain on the eyes, while the crouching position can be a cause of chronic backache and pain in the joints,” says Abdul Ghaffar Shirani, coordinator, Pak Social Welfare, a community-based organization working, in the area of child labour.

The factories usually operate from three in the morning until noon, as the scorching Hyderabad heat makes it impossible to work during the day. These factories are shed-like structures, made of cement, with ventilators and windows as the only form of ventilation since fans cannot be used.

The heat of the furnace can reach up to 500 degrees Celsius and sometimes even more, creating an extremely hot working environment. The workers wear no protective gear and the possibility of injury through burns is considerably high.

Irfan, an extremely skinny 16-year-old, clad in a shalwar and a T-shirt with a towel stitched across the front, bakes (the process is called pakai) bangles to bring out the gold sheen in the gold-coated bangles, by placing them meticulously on large metal trays, which are then slid into a hot oven. While not extremely hazardous, the task is tedious and requires one to be energetic and, at the same time, patient.

Having studied till class five, Irfan wants to go back to school and continue with his education and later join a college. But for now his aim is to be able to find the time and the money to attend the local madrassa.

The last process is the counting of bangles that is neither challenging nor hazardous yet it is a more trying task than one can imagine. For Saima and her sisters, work begins at three in the afternoon when the bangles arrive. And then it is seven hours of uninterrupted counting and making of toras. With the way the bangles are laid out, the only way to do the job efficiently is by squatting while leaning forward. The task requires complete concentration as losing count requires one to start all over.

After squatting for seven straight hours she is unable to stand up as her knees shake uncontrollably, and do not have the strength to support her. In addition, her posture has been permanently ruined, and she can no longer stand up straight. The doctor can offer little relief besides rest and painkillers. The only cure, is to discontinue the work, which is not a financially viable option.

The study was unable to gauge exactly how much each child earns, as most work is home-based and the children assist their parents. The money generated from the work is handed over to the parents in a lump sum. From that the child receives an average of Rs50 a month to spend however he/she wishes. The rest goes into the household kitty, and the young breadwinners had little or no control or decision-making power over how its spent. The average monthly income came to Rs 4280, of which, an average of Rs 2685 (63 per cent) was generated through glass bangle work.

The report concludes, without a shred of doubt, “the need for these children to work and generate supplementary income”.— Dawn/IPS

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