Ten-year-old Amar Kumar Manjhi (name changed) often accompanied his parents Raghu Manjhi and Sita Devi (names changed) to a brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh. There, he befriended fourteen-year-old Vikas, who one day made Amar an offer:“I am going to work in a bangle factory in Jaipur. Will you come?”

Amar agreed. “I thought, let us go and see.”

The very next day, a thikadar (contractor) came to Vikas’ house to take him to Jaipur. Vikas and the contractor rode a bike down to the makeshift hut near the brick kiln where Amar lived with his parents.

It was a chilly  evening in 2018. “Shitlahari gir raha tha (There was a cold wave) ,” remembered Amar, sitting in his dilapidated house at Shahpur village in Bihar’s
Gaya district.

Amar had not revealed his plans to his father for fear of being denied permission. “I told him that I would  come back in a few minutes,” he said. Clad in a shirt,  trousers and slippers, along with a shawl to protect himself against the cold, Amar got on the bike with Vikas instead. They travelled for about two hours to a bus stand from where the three of them took a Jaipur-bound bus.

Fellow passengers asked the contractor why and where he was taking the children. His responses were curt, saying that  they were being taken, with the blessings of their parents, to be enrolled in a school in Jaipur.

“I felt strange; nothing of that sort had happened so why was the contractor saying such things? It was then that I realised  I had made a mistake,” said Amar.

It took them about twelve hours to reach Jaipur. A half-hour auto ride from the bus stand later, Amar found himself in a tiny room inside a two-storey building in the Shivajinagar area. The room already had about seven children, aged between seven and fourteen, in it. They were all working.  

There were three stone platforms on which colourful gems and bundles of golden brocade were scattered. The children squatted, picking  up gems with their little fingers and using a chimta (tongs) to stick them neatly into lac bangles. Shabby mattresses and dirty sheets occupied one corner of the room. Three supervisors sharply monitored  the children’s work.

This room became Amar’s workstation. He worked for about sixteen hours a day, often without much food, and suffered frequent reprimands from the supervisors. At times, they just beat him up.

But Amar Kumar’s journey from Gaya to the lac bangle workshop in Jaipur is not unique. It is a fate that thousands of children suffer every year.

The use of bangles for ornamentation is ancient. Travelling back in time to 2500 BCE, the famous bronze sculpture of the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro shows the early use of bangles for adornment. Apart from metals, bangles are made of glass as well as lac or lakh or lah. Glass bangles present limited opportunities for decorative work since liquid forms of glass dry fast. Lac bangles, on the other hand, are sturdier and can be adorned with intricate detailing and decorative work.

Lac is a substance produced by the lac insect. The insects live on tropical trees and suck the plant sap, secreting a resin while growing. The secretion is processed and prepared for making bangles.

Its speciality lies in its malleability, allowing it to be moulded into a desired shape. Lac is produced mostly in India, Thailand and Myanmar. While lac bangles are made in many cities in India, Jaipur is said to be the biggest hub.

The history of lac bangles in Jaipur is as old as the city itself. Raja Sawai Jaisingh II, king of the Kachwaha clan, founded a new capital city for his kingdom on 18 November 1727—which was named Jaipur after him. The king, desiring an arts and crafts cluster in the  new city, invited artisans from far and wide to settle in Jaipur. Amongst those who migrated were bangle makers, whom he encouraged to practise their craft.

Much of the bangle trade in Jaipur is unorganised, making it difficult to gauge the scale of  production and revenue. According to one estimate, the market for lac bangles is worth 75 crore to 80 crore rupees. “Jaipur has 40,000 to 50,000 unauthorised bangle workshops where 1 lakh to 1.25 lakh children are employed,” said Vivek Sharma, a social activist and lawyer working against child labour in Rajasthan. “Most of the children are from the deprived communities of Bihar, and especially from Gaya.”

The small, nimble hands of children are ideal for the bangle business,  suited as they are for the fine work of embedding stones on bangles. Children from the socially marginalised scheduled castes (SCs) are the main labour source. Traffickers or contractors often get young boys in lieu of promises of monthly payments of 2,000 to 3,000 rupees. At times, the children are kept captive at the work sites and are made to work for longer hours, ensuring higher profit margins for the owners.

The Gaya district in Bihar is a recruitment hotspot for the bangle makers of Jaipur. While there is no official data on the number of children from Gaya employed in the bangle factories in Jaipur, when children are rescued, many turn out to be from the district, say members of the Gaya Child Welfare Committee (CWC) and activists working with rescued children in Bihar.

“Almost fifty per cent of rescued children from other states belong to Bihar and most of them are from Gaya,” said Suresh Kumar, a child rights activist based in the state.

According to a list maintained by the Jaipur Child Welfare Committee and accessed by Object, as many as 1,584 children from Bihar were rescued from various bangle workshops between 2018 and 2023, of which 436—twenty-seven per cent—children belonged to Gaya alone.

Gaya, situated on the banks of the Phalgu river, is a major religious and tourist centre. Poverty has been a chronic disease in the district. In 1883, a member of the House of Commons, quoting a report by Bengal Civil Service officer Sir George Abraham Grierson, had said that in Gaya, a couple earned just forty-one rupees and twelve annas after working for a year. The report added that if there were four members in a family, each one would get only ten rupees and seven annas  a year, whereas a person needed at least fifteen rupees to meet their minimum needs.

This revelation by Grierson still seems to hold true for Gaya.

Gaya is home to eight per cent of Bihar’s 1.65-crore SC population. About thirty-five per cent of Gaya’s population (38,09,817; 2011 census) consists of SCs.

At least twenty-two socially and economically deprived castes including Dusadhs, Chamars and Musahars fall under the SC bracket; they are landless and survive on a meagre income from seasonal agriculture works and labour at brick kilns.

According to the recent caste survey conducted by the Bihar government, 42.93 per cent SC families are poor—which is the highest among any other caste group. (The Bihar government considers a family poor if the collective monthly income is less than 6,000 rupees.) Among the SCs, Musahars are the poorest. Caste survey data reveals that 54.56 per cent of the 8,73,281 Musahar families are poor, which is the highest among all SCs.

Bihar is home to 34.41 lakh Musahars (including the Bhuiya community, though the Bihar government considers them a separate caste). Of these, 18.9 per cent or 6.51 lakh live in Gaya district. The chronic poverty makes the Dalits, especially Musahar children, highly vulnerable to trafficking.

When Amar was put to work, he started missing his parents and cried a lot. When he asked the contractor to send him back to his parents, he was refused. “The contractor told me that I could not go to my parents, as they had taken 1,500 rupees in advance,” he said.

Amar was not alone in his desire to return home. He learnt that some of the children he worked with had been there for more than two years, without paying even a single visit home.

Sensing no escape, he resigned to learning bangle-making. “I  learnt the work in just one week,” he said.

The work would start at 6 am and go on till midnight. “I had to pick up gemstones one by one with the tongs and embed them in the bangles. My legs would hurt because of long hours of sitting,” he said. “We were not allowed to go out of the room. If anybody fell sick, the owner would administer  medicine to them. They would not even take us to a doctor.”

Unlike many other children, Amar didn't have to suffer for long. He was rescued within a month of his ordeal beginning.

According to a 2004-2005 report of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), there were as many as 90.75 lakh child labourers in India. Census 2011 put this figure at 43.53 lakh. The Union ministry of labour and employment, in its official website, attributed this decline to the ‘fruits’ of their efforts. But the reality of the matter is different.

The National Child Labour Project (NCLP), first announced in 1987, envisaged an action plan focussed on districts where trafficking was rampant.  According to the project document, children have to be rehabilitated according to their age group once they are withdrawn from work. If the rescued child is between the ages of five and eight years, they have to be directly admitted into the formal educational system through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Children between nine to fourteen years have to be rehabilitated through NCLP Special Training Centres where they are provided bridge education, vocational training, mid-day meals, a monthly stipend, and healthcare.

The scheme is to be implemented through a registered society under the chairmanship of the district magistrate or collector, with representations from other organs of the state and civil society.

Every child enrolled in special schools run under NCLP  has to be paid a stipend of 100 rupees per month, deposited directly to their bank account, which the child can withdraw at the time of leaving the special school.

The government told the Lok Sabha in 2023 that about fourteen lakh child labourers had been rescued/withdrawn from work, rehabilitated and mainstreamed since the inception of the NCLP scheme. However, at least half a dozen children interviewed admitted that they had not  received any benefits under NCLP.

Amar was rescued on 14 February 2019. Acting on a tip-off from a social worker, police and child welfare authorities raided three rooms of Building No 673 in Shivajinagar and rescued eighteen children, including Amar.

“The owner had drilled into us that we had to hide ourselves and our tongs in case of a raid,” he said. Later, when the police asked him where he had hidden his tools, he wilfully handed them over.

The police officers took all the rescued children to the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) in Jaipur and brought them before a magistrate. They were then put into a shelter home, where Amar, along with other children, stayed for six months. Generally, the rescued children are to be kept safe in such homes until their respective states verify their addresses. After six months, Amar and the other children were brought to Patna and from there they were produced before the CWCs of their respective districts. Amar had to spend another two months in a shelter home in Gaya. “The shelter homes at both places were good. The food was also of quality and we would get it on time… I sometimes felt like staying there forever,” Amar recalled.

After two months, Amar’s father signed a bond stating that he would not send him to work again and brought him home.

Amar was ten years old then. Ideally, he should have been registered for the NCLP scheme immediately. “I waited for four months but no government official visited us nor was I paid any money from the government,” he said. “I could not get enrolled in a government school either.”

“Then one day Vijayji (Vijay Kewat, a social worker) came to us and asked me what I wanted to do. I told him that I wanted to go to school, so he enrolled me in a government school in Class 6,” he said.

Sateendra Mandal was twelve when he was trafficked to a Jaipur bangle workshop around July 2019.

It began when Lorit Kumar, a distant relative, came to Sateendra’s mud house at Beldih village in Gaya and spoke to his mother about a rather attractive job prospect for her son. It was at a bangle-making factory in Jaipur, where Sateendra would be paid 1,500 rupees a month. This seemed like a great idea to his mother Sapti Devi, a forty-five-year-old wage worker. So, the deal was sealed at 2,000 rupees a month, and one month’s wages were given as an advance.

“It was my mistake to send him… I made this mistake…,” she told Object.

Sateendra and four other boys boarded a train from Gaya junction to Jaipur. There, a tiny room in Building No 938 in the residential locality of Sanjay Nagar became his workshop.

Sateendra had to wake up at 7 am and start working. There were six other young boys with him, and their daily collective target was twelve packets of  bangles with twelve bangles in each packet. “It would take five minutes to finish one bangle,” he said.

The boys were practically imprisoned in the workshop. The sunlight filtering through the windows was their only connection to the world outside.

“We had to achieve our target at any cost. We were not allowed to sleep until we finished making all the bangles,” said Sateendra.

He had worked for nearly seven months when his workshop was raided in January 2020. He finally returned home in October 2020 after having stayed nine months in shelter homes in Jaipur and Gaya. Like in the case of Amar, no government official contacted Sateendra for rehabilitation under the NCLP. He too, later procured admission in a government school through the social worker Vijay Kewat.

Currently, the NCLP project is barely being implemented in Bihar. On 29 November 2021, Rameswar Teli, minister of state for labour and employment, said in a written reply in Parliament that the scheme had been sanctioned for twenty-four districts in Bihar but was not operational in any of them.

A government press release issued in August 2022, which talks about the fund disbursal for states where the scheme is operational, does not include Bihar. The release also goes on to show that there have been no beneficiaries for the scheme from Bihar after 2017-18. Arun Kumar Shrivastava, the district labour commissioner of Gaya, confirmed with Object that the project was no longer functioning in Bihar. “It was operational in Bihar but now it is not working. I don’t know why it was stopped here,” he added.

Mukhtarul Haque, state coordinator of Bachpan Bachao Andolan—an anti-trafficking movement which was started in 1980 by Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi—said that hundreds of special training centres under NCLP in various districts of Bihar, including Gaya, were defunct because the district magistrates did not provide the utilisation details of the Union government funding.

The Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation reiterated this in a 2022 report. According to the report, “There is a wide gap between sanctioned and operational NCLP districts, indicating lapses in funding and utilisation mechanisms, both at the central and state government level. Surprisingly, Bihar, a state with a high incidence of child labour, does not have a single operational NCLP district.”

Since the NCLP is not operational in any of the twenty-four sanctioned districts, there is no data on children who have been rescued and rehabilitated.  “We have been working with 900 rescued children but not a single child has received benefits under NCLP. The state government is more active on this and children are getting state government benefits,” said Suresh Kumar, a child rights activist.

All children rescued from bangle-making sweatshops also meet the criteria of “bonded labour” under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.

Though it is the responsibility of the state government to identify, release and rehabilitate bonded labourers, the Union government is a major contributor to rehabilitation schemes.

The Union government pays 30,000 rupees as soon as a child is rescued.  The balance of two lakh rupees is paid by the state government in two ways: a sum of  1.25 lakh rupees is deposited in an annuity scheme in the name of the beneficiary and 75,000 rupees are deposited directly into their bank account.

However, the procedural requirements and paperwork necessary to get these benefits are often too difficult to procure for those coming out of bonded labour.  

For the immediate relief of 30,000 rupees, the victim must have a bonded labour certificate issued by a sub-divisional magistrate (SDM). The SDM is required  to visit a rescued child in a shelter home, ascertain facts about the workspace and issue the certificate if it meets the definition of bonded labour under the law.

Every child we spoke to said that they had not received the amount.

“Often, the SDM does not do an adequate scrutiny to ascertain if children are indeed bonded labour. The children are so young that they are often unable to comprehend and answer questions. This way, most of them do not get a bonded labour certificate,” said Vivek Sharma, a social activist from Rajasthan.

The financial assistance of 2,00,000 rupees is linked to convictions under the bonded labour law. For that to happen, First Information Reports need to be filed under the provisions of the Bonded Labour Act—something that seldom happens.

According to the law, bonded labour is defined as “any kind of work or service which any person is coerced or forced to do against his or her will under threat, coercion or violence”. Bangle sweatshops like the kind where Amar worked clearly meet this threshold of illegality.

“If the police lodge complaints under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act,  they have to do a thorough investigation and gather proof that the rescued children were indeed bonded labourers. So they lodge complaints under other acts,“ Neeraj Kashyap, a Gaya-based lawyer representing cases related to child trafficking, said.

Where cases are registered under the bonded labour law, children are threatened or lured with money to turn hostile in court.   Their parents are often too poor to make the frequent journeys to the place of rescue to comply with court proceedings.

Sateendra Manjhi is a witness in his child labour case.

“The contractor threatened me twice. Once he threatened to set my house on fire and the second time he told me that he would kill me at my house. Once, even the trafficker offered me money to turn hostile but I didn't entertain it,” said Sateendra.

He was finally able to record his statement in a Jaipur court. But despite his statement, the case still drags on, as two other witnesses have turned hostile.

“I roam in the village and tell my story to children so that they don’t go to Jaipur,” said Amar.

Amar is currently studying in Class 8. “If I become a police officer or DM , I will be able to prevent children from getting trafficked,” he said.

Apart from rescue, rehabilitation and mainstreaming of children, NCLP also focuses on raising the income of the rescued children’s families, as financial vulnerability plays a key role in trafficking for child labour.

If NCLP schemes had worked, Raghu Manjhi’s life would have changed for the better.  When we met Amar at his home, he was alone with his grandmother. His parents were at a brick kiln somewhere in Jharkhand. “They come on weekends for a day,” Amar said.

At the brick kiln, Raghu Manjhi earns 400 rupees for making 1,000 bricks. As Amar stays alone at home, it makes him vulnerable to re-trafficking.