Some years ago I talked with activist K. Satyanarayana Rao of the M. Venkatarangaiya Foundation, better known as MV Foundation. According to their website:

“Based on the non-negotiable principle that ‘no child works and every child attends full time formal school as a matter of right’, MVF has been working towards abolition of child labour in all its forms and mainstreaming them into formal schools, for over a decade now. From its humble beginning in three villages in 1991, it has now spread its philosophy far and wide.”

Rao talks about child labour and the fact that many children are held behind fenced industries making it difficult to provide evidence. No activist ever succeeded to enter these guarded wall with machine guns, let alone to smuggle evidence. I asked Mr. Rao whether they had ever tried it with a white man. He looks at me quizzically. “No, of course not. To much danger.” But I am stubborn. After a while we exchange ideas. He talks about Jaya Biscuit Industries, owned by the state.

The adventure goes like this: on a sunny day I am visiting Jaya Biscuit Industries with Rao. The local printer made me 50 glossy business cards, printing:

Hans Sluijter
Director of Importing/Exporting
Dutch Biscuits Worldwide Limited

I made up a website and contact details. Rao acts as my local guide and translator. The factory is spacious with, in my memory, watchtowers and two guards at the gate, one with a machine gun. They walked to us aggressively, but when I handed over my business card we should wait. With a bakelite telephone he made a phone call and after a few minutes a Jurassic Park-like gate opened. One of the guards gave him my business card and one second later he walked towards us with a smile on his face and an outstretched hand: he is Mr. P. Satya Narayana, General Manager. When the Jurassic gate closed behind us, we are on point of no return.

In the ‘oval office’ we talked about my personal life, little things and my business in India. In the meanwhile we were served tea with biscuits by a young kid of around 8. At a certain point he asked in which hotel I stayed. I said: “Golkanda Hotel”. And he invited himself to have dinner with me later this evening at Golkonda Hotel. He excused himself for a moment, of coursing checking me on Golkonda’s guest list. When he came back with a smile, we knew we past the exams. A risky moment: I asked for a guided tour. And…he agreed.

First we came in a room were they make cookie batter. I tasted it, acting like a connoisseur and making intelligent comments. There were no kids, only some youngsters. After this we came in a hall in the size of a single gymnasium. I saw what I was looking for but I took not further attention to it. On the left side and the length of the hall, stands a biscuit machine. I immediately ran towards it, pretending to be surprised about the technology. I asked Satya Narayana if I could make some photos and I took my camera. The digital age had not yet made its appearance and I took with me a camera with one button. Carrying an SLR-camera would draw attention of being undercover as a journalist. I made several picture from the automatic assembly line. Coming at the end, I make a turn of 180 degrees facing the kids. I also made two pictures. I knew in advance that I would not make sharp pictures with a pocket camera, but the initial goal was to come back with some kind of physical evidence within a reasonable safe undercover act. I estimate the children to be five to twelve years old. After an hour we went outside. With a machine gun in the corner of my eye, I shaked the hand of Satya Narayana. He reminded me to our meeting in my hotel this evening. The Jurassic gate closed, sealing the children. Once in my hotel I checked out and went to another one.

I gave the negatives of the photo’s to the MV Foundation but until this day I am not aware about what they have done with it.

My base camp was Kalkaji, New Delhi. I worked at the Global March Against Child Labour. The Global March was run by SACCS, South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude. Nowadays, it is known as BBA, Bachpan Bachao Andolan. It is here, that a philosophical miracle happened to me. I told my victory to some people until I stumbled on a question. Someone asked me:
‘Did you asked yourself the right questions?’
I did not know what that question meant. So silence was necessary to shape an answer. I could only come up with:
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who is serving this undercover operation? Did you asked the kids or the parents of the kids if they wanted to be rescued?’
‘Huh?!?!?!’
There was no prior research and I sailed blindly on the MV Foundation. I even did not asked questions about it. I was out for excitement, adventure and a story. Was I selfish, seeking for glory, a showpiece or a gimmie? Perhaps the families of the children needed the income to come out of poverty in which I pushed them even further. To save you a long story, it’s okay to free kids but not just like headless chickens in a vacuum. Ethics should go hand in hand with good intentions. Good intention are not always the best choice. Perhaps there had been better options with these photographs and with greater impact. Who knows.

According to ABOLITION OF CHILD LABOUR IN INDIA, Strategies for the Eleventh Five Year Plan, submitted by National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) to Planning Commission of India the work of a Social Mobiliser is tough and complex:

The eradication of child labour cannot be done by the labour department alone, as it is so under-staffed. Labour department needs to have a cadre of youth volunteers who can be trained as ‘Social Mobilisers’ who will be responsible for withdrawing children from work as well as monitoring school dropouts and children with irregularity of attendance. It is understood that if such children are not tracked they would join the labour force as child labour.

There’s a wide range of tasks waiting for Social Mobilisers:

• Identify and establish contact with child labourers
• Motivate parents not to send their children to work but to school
• Persuade employers to release child labourers
• Organize mobilization programmes at the local levels by organizing street theatre, public meetings and rallies, house-to-house surveys to build up a social norm and a consensus that children must not work.
• Assist local community groups to organize child rights protection committees which can be the watchdogs of various government departments dealing with child labour eradication.
• Liaise with local officials in the education, labour, police and social welfare departments and bring problems and identify solutions.
• Assist locally elected bodies to be vigilant about children’s rights and to monitor and review the prevalence of child labour in their areas.
• Strengthen school education committees (SEC) so that school functioning improves and drop-outs (potential child labourers) are reduced.
• Bring rescued children to transitional educational centres from where they can be mainstreamed into the formal school system.
• Follow up of the regularity of attendance of all school going children and establish processes of reviewing through the gram panchayats.

This endorses the statement of BBA: freeing children is not just an executive task and one should first identify all stakeholders and their interests before taking action.

On the other hand, there is no excuse for goverments for such practices. A study called Child Labour in China’s Informalized Urban Industrial Sector investigated the manufacturing sector in Shenzhen, China.

Of the 37 factories, 20 of them (54 per cent) had at least one child worker (…) and child workers are frequently discovered in state factories, large private factories, and even in supply factories for Western brand companies.

Child Labour and Human Rights, A Prospective, Dr. Nanjunda D.C., ISBN 81-7835-645-7 state:

Most governments deny the existence of the problem, and some of the actually sustain the practice by hiring child labourers in state-owned enterprises. India is and “exemplary” case that demonstrate all of these problems.

Sans in Wheels ratifies this with more detail.

In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh alone, 247,800 children work in cottonseed production and around 450,000 in all of India, most of them for Indian-owned companies.

Cover album The Wall, Pink Floyd

There are many walls, for example the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the Bangladesh–India border, the Israeli Security Wall and the Mexico–United States barrier. There are even walls inside peoples heads. I do not know how many walls goverments have build worldwide around working children, like Jaya Biscuit Industries. Could these goverments have walls inside their heads? Maybe the cover of the album ‘The Wall’ of Pink Floyd is expressing the situation of these kids in the best thinkable way. In that case, each liberation is justified and social workers, journalists, activists and NGOs are not just looking for a gimmie.

AUTHOR: H.R.J. Sluijter MA
URL: www.NL-Aid.org
E-MAIL: info [at] www.NL-Aid.org

WHAT’S IN A BATTERY?

There are two different types of batteries: primary and secondary. The chemical reactions that occur in primary batteries are irreversible, the stored energy can be used only once making the battery disposable. The chemical reactions that occur in secondary batteries are however reversible. These batteries can be recharged many times and gradually lose the ability to take and release energy.

There are many types of household batteries with different variations of chemical soups. The ingredients may include:

• toxic heavy metals like mercury, cadmium, zinc, lead, manganese dioxide/manganese (IV) oxide
• ammonium chloride salt (sodium and chlorine)
• zinc chloride
• silver oxide
• carbon dust (also known as black dust)
• car batteries also use hydrochloric

The vast recycling business in South Asia is divers, but the recycling of household batteries exceeds all of them. The whole day, children are hitting with hammers on batteries. They collect reusable carbon rods and sell it to factories who re-use it or melt them. Meanwhile, the skin and lungs of the children are filled with black dust and with the other listed toxic substances. What a prospect…not.

Child workers in battery recharging/recycling establishments are in particular investigated in Bangladesh and China. But also East-India (mainly Calcutta) is infected.

BANGLADESH

According to Baseline Survey on Child Workers in Battery, Recharging/Recycling Sector, 2002-03 by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, there are…

“…a total of 12,207 battery recharging/recycling establishments all over Bangladesh. The survey also estimated a national total of 5,513 child workers aged 5-17 years in these 12,207 establishments. About 36.9 percent of the working children worked 7-8 hours a day and 24.6 percent worked 9 to 10 hours. On an average, the child workers worked 8.2 hours a day. About 23.4 percent of the total working children reported various types of health problems such as fever, burns, headache etc. during the reference period of the survey. Only 13.2 percent of total working children reported using protective gear for avoiding risk. Out of 5513 working children, 824 or 15 percent were found to be abused by owners/employers at work place. Among the abused children a significant share (90.7%) were verbally rebuked/abused.”

CHINA

Wu Y, Huang Q, Zhou X, Hu G, Wang Z, Li H, et al, describe in Study on the effects of lead from small industry of battery recycling on environment and children’s health the following environmental variables: lead levels in air, soil, drinking water and crops were measured. Biological monitoring: 959 children aged 5 – 12 years were selected from villages where the lead smelters located near the residential areas and the battery disassembling was done in some families. The control children (207 pupils) were from other villages without lead exposure. Blood lead, ZnPP and teeth lead were determined. Height, weight and head circle of children and IQ scores were measured. They concluded…

“…the average lead concentrations in air and soils were 8.5 times and 10 times of the MACs (national health standard) respectively. Eighty-five per cent the air samples with lead concentrations higher than the national health standard. The mean blood lead and ZnPP levels of children lived in the polluted areas were 496 microgram/L and 9.41 microgram/g Hb respectively. The lead exposure caused adverse effects on children’s IQ and physical development.”

CALCUTTA

Some years ago I roamed along the slums of Calcutta, ending up in what is called Dhobia Tola. I saw many blackened kids hitting batteries in most slums, but Dhobia Tola beats them all. There are many studies about the ragpickers of Kolkata, but none about the battery industry. There is even no information available on toxic exposures to children in India. On the Internet and at universities of Kolkata, data are lacking on all aspects of this subject: numbers of children exposed, duration of exposure, substances involved, resulting illnesses, and long-term effects. But in general, data are unavailable by country, by region, or globally. A missing link?

According to an article in The Telegraph (15/01/1998), a person should at least consume 400 grams of cereal per day to rise above the poverty line, but each day a person has 300 grams of grain to survive. If it is less, then you simply do not exist. Roughly, one can assume that all poor people, who use up between 300 and 400 grams per day, consume an average of 350 grams per day. In other words, only 50 grams of cereals per person per day is needed to rise above the poverty line. In places like Dhobia Tola, the fight about 50 grams is a necessity, among other things resulting in kids recycling batteries.

HEALTH

Let us cut the crap and list all possible health problems the kids are dealing with. Lead poisoning leads to vomiting, muscle and general weakness, loss of appetite, anemia, kidney problems, neurological disorders, brain damage, unconsciousness and possible convulsions, eventually followed by death.

Mercury poisoning leads to sensory impairment (vision, hearing, speech), disturbed sensation, lack of coordination, peripheral neuropathy (presenting as paresthesia or itching, burning or pain), skin discoloration (pink cheeks, fingertips and toes), swelling, desquamation (shedding of skin), profuse sweating, persistently faster-than-normal heart beat, increased salivation, hypertension (high blood pressure), increased sensitivity to light, kidney dysfunction, neuropsychiatric symptoms such as emotional lability, memory impairment, or insomnia.

Carbon dust does not irritate the skin, but fine particles can become embedded in the skin and trapped in hair follicles causing discolouration (carbon black tattoos) and follicular blackheads. High concentrations of dust can overwhelm the clearance capacity of the lungs, obstruct the lungs, and interfere with lung function. Symptoms may include coughing, increased phlegm production, and shortness of breath. It also leads to reduced lung function, emphysema and/or chronic bronchitis, fibrosis (scarring of the lungs).

Manganese dioxide may enter the body via the lungs or digestive tract. Dust from the atmosphere or from contaminated hands or food may also enter the mouth and be swallowed. Absorbed manganese accumulates in the blood leads to deposition in the majority of the body’s organs, loss of weight, loss of appetite, headaches, dizziness, somnolence, apathy and in the end it affects the nervous system.

Zinc poisoning result into vomiting, stomach cramps, diarrhea, low blood pressure, urine retention, jaundice, seizures, joint pain, fever, coughing and a metallic taste in the mouth.

The symptoms of cadmium poisoning are chills, fever, muscle ache, tracheo-bronchitis, pneumonitis, pulmonary edema, cough, dryness and irritation of the nose and throat, headache, dizziness, weakness, fever, chills, chest pain, liver and kidney problems (kidneys can shrink up to 30%, this is irreversible). The bones become soft (osteomalacia), kids lose bone mineral density (osteoporosis) and become weaker.

I count 94 symptoms which could infect these children. Do we need to say more? Is there any future for these kids? Are they able to concentrate on school? Should they resist all forms of cancer or even premature aging? What are their dreams which they are still able to achieve?

FINALLY

The battery recharging/recycling establishments are not mentioned by any NGO in the world, by means of a campaign, research or study. I am not making an attempt…no way. I just wanted to put the issue on the map and thus ratifying any campaign which is fighting against child labour. Maybe someday, someone will do a solid research to solve the missing link as mentioned. This so-called recycling business is a total misery and ugliness of a forgotten industry.

AUTHOR: Drs. H.R.J. Sluijter
URL: www.NL-Aid.org
E-MAIL: info [at] www.NL-Aid.org