LJN Blog Posts

Its fair to say that I am a seasoned traveller to the Indian sub continent, having visited the place for work and pleasure regularly since 2006.  Travelling to India, its always fun and always an eye opener but its fair to say my recent visit was the most interesting to date.  I travelled to India in March 2016 for a field meeting for the project we are supporting to create child labour free zones in Budhpura, the village that's the heartland of Indian Sandstone Sett production.  It was a flying visit, literally!  Landed in India on the Saturday at 6am, spent the day visiting factories and yards (with no sleep),  a project meeting on the Sunday, a day on the ground in Budhpura on the Monday before flying back to the UK on Tuesday.  This is usually the way things are and it blows away any romantic notion of sightseeing and work jollies, the schedules are always tough and gruelling.  

We had a chaotic but very interesting project meeting on the Sunday.  Everyone was in attendance, The Manjari Project Team (Manjari are the NGO on the ground in Budhpura driving this project), London Stone, Stoneasy, ICN, TFT, Stop Child Labour.  The meeting was buzzing with the news that we had secured agreement from all 25 cobble yards in Budhpura that none of them would be employing children in their yards going forward. This was big news, a great achievement for the project, massive praise must go to Manjari who had to break down so many barriers to deliver this.  What made the news all the better was that the owners of the cobble yards had even come up with their own system of self policing to ensure children weren't being employed, sustainable is the buzz word and is what everything needs to be.  This was starting to feel sustainable!

Everyone was excited from the news and the meeting was chaotic for a while but eventually things settled down and we started to talk about the next steps. The news was great but it didn't tell the whole story.  A large proportion of the cobbles coming from Budhpura are produced at home or in the quarries, before being brought to Budhpura to be grade and packed.  Our discussions for the afternoon now revolved around this.  Home working is the biggest issue of all.  One of the biggest issues with foreign supply chains is visibility.  Supply chains become fragmented and it becomes difficult to know what is happening in them.  There is no better example of this than home working.  Any supply chains where homework is present are notoriously difficult to navigate, so this was the challenge we faced as we sat down to try and find a way forward.  I'm currently working on a proposal to address this issues but until we have secured agreement from all parties I'm not in a position to share it.  Hopefully it wont be long though, everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goal of eradicating child labour in Budhpura.

Meeting over we had some fun meeting local children who use the Manjari community centre.  I had brought some sports equipment as a gift for the community centre, so the next hour was spent playing cricket and badmington, well, trying to anyway.

The next day was all a little bit off the cuff but I had decided to do some sight seeing but with a work angle.  I wanted to visit a few quarries, production yards and generally just take a look around Budhpura to get an even better idea of the community and how things functioned.  I told one of my trusted suppliers about the plan and he said he was happy to accompany me, so we jumped in his car and headed to Budhpura stopping here and there along the way.  A few photos of my journey

All in all it was an eye opening day.  I left with the impression of not what we had done but how much work was left to do.  A little bit daunting but if we keep making steady progress then bit by bit we are going to see real and sustainable improvements in the lives of the people of Budhpura