Despite promises of reform, exploitation remains endemic in India’s sandstone industry, with children doing dangerous work for low pay – often to decorate driveways and gardens thousands of miles away
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-year-old, 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.
