DADU, Oct 19 Her deeply furrowed and work-hardened hands tremble and she feels needles of pain piercing through her body as she winds leaves of a wild plant into different sizes of ropes, a job she has been doing since her childhood, but she does not stop. She can not stop.

She has to finish the job by the sunset everyday to be able to earn a paltry amount of Rs1,000 to 1,100, sum of her month long hard work, for her family.

Years of work with ropes with no idea of using protective gear to shield themselves against stinging leaves and dust particles, have made 75-year-old Noori and her colleagues patients of asthma and tuberculosis.

She lives in a makeshift house amidst a cluster of huts belonging to her tribe in Sobho Faqir Rustamani village, 15 kilometres from Wahi Pandhi town of Dadu district.

Their children, girls and boys, are seen busy in helping their elders to make ropes. They carry bundles of the leaves of 'Peesh', a wild plant used in rope making, on their heads or donkeys to their homes after buying them from Wahi Pandhi town.

Mostly, Mari and Brohi tribesmen bring the leaves from Khuzdar, Hub, Saroon and Lohi areas of Balochistan after crossing over Gorakh Hill Station to Wahi Pandhi, major town of Kachho area close to the border of Balochistan and sell the leaves to middlemen who then sell them to rope making tribes in the area.

Hundreds of families from Sori, Nali Jabal, Koro Koat, Bakhra Jamali, Sevo Jamali and Jalib Rind have been associated with this trade for years. Showing her calloused and infected hands, Ms Noori said she purchased peesh at Rs350-400 per 40 kg. It took her 12-15 days to wind the leaves into ropes and sold the finished material for Rs800-Rs900 to middlemen, she said.

She said she would earn Rs1,000-Rs1,100 a month, which was too little an amount to feed a family. She has three sons and three daughters who help her in rope making.

Her job had made her asthma and TB patient but still she had to wake up early in the morning and continue to work till late into night, she said.

Noori's son, Mohammad Laiq, 45, said that he fell ill two years ago and went to some quacks, who had nearly paralysed his one hand by wrong injections.

Shamsuddin Rustamani, a villager, said that he was an asthma patient and rope making only worsened his condition but he had no other recourse to feed his five children.

Misri Rustamani said that the middlemen earned huge profits at the expense of rope-makers.

His two brothers were patients of hepatitis but they had no money to get treatment, he said.

Ghulam Qadir Leghari, a middleman in Wahi Pandhi, said that he purchased raw material at Rs200 per maund (maund=40kg) and sold it at Rs350-Rs400 per maund.

Mohammad Sharif, a rope seller, said that he purchased ropes for Rs800-Rs1,100 and sold them in Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Mirpurkhas and other towns for Rs1,600-Rs2,000 per maund.

Dr Zubair Ahmed, in-charge of Wahi Pandhi Basic Health Unit, said that poverty was the chief accused in increasing number of asthma and TB patients in rope making villagers.

They usually deferred going to a doctor and tried to wait till the disease worsened and entered advanced stage, he said, adding that 80 per cent of them were TB and asthma patients.

TRDP (Thardeep), an NGO, has established its unit in the area to provide soft loans to the poor families to enable them to set up small businesses.

The NGO gives small loans of Rs10,000 to a family and recovers it in instalments without charging any interest. TRDP's child rights specialist Ms Nasreen Shaikh said that 100 per cent girls of the village were involved in rope making business.

Kachho belt was a rain-fed area where livelihood options were few and far between and children were forced to support their parents financially, she said.

She said that TRDP planned to open a non-formal primary school for girls in Sobho Faqir Rustamani village.