Your Indian Handknotted Rug Was Probably Made By Child Labor
- Forbes
- May 2, 2014
- 2 min read
If you’ve bought a hand-made Indian rug, it’s quite likely that it was woven by children, and quite often by slave labor, according to a new study by FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.
The report, Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India’s Hand-Made Carpet Sector,documents over 3,200 cases across nine states in India and found several hundred cases, each, of forced labor, bonded labor, child labor and human trafficking, at carpet factories run by exporters who ship these rugs to some of the biggest retail stores in the U.S.
The report, written by Harvard adjunct faculty member Siddharth Kara, documents the supply chain of tainted carpets from the point of production to the point of retail sale in the United States. According to the report, some of the retailers who sell carpets from those exporters and importers
Retailers, when contacted, said they were strictly against all forms of child labor and would look into the issues raised in the report. (You can read their detailed responses below.)
Child labor is an old problem in India as I found out when I was reporting on the topic for a story for Forbes back in 2008. I traveled across the country from Monsanto's MON +0.67% cotton fields in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh to the slums of Delhi to sandstone quarries of Rajasthan to the carpet belt near Varanasi. At every place I met children hard at work, picking cotton buds, sticking sparkling stones to picture frames and pen holders, chiseling stone into cobbles and pavers and weaving carpets. Some were as young as five or six while others had spent their adolescence in these jobs, living in extreme poverty and usually away from their families.
So while this is not new, it’s worrying that despite ample scrutiny, child labor is still so prevalent in India.
India’s carpet industry has traditionally been focused in the cities of Bhadohi, Mirzapur, and Varanasi in southeast Uttar Pradesh, the country’s ost populous, and amongst the poorest, state. After years of scrutiny although cases of use of child labor in those areas have dropped, the practice has not ended. Rather, it has shifted to other cities, a few hundred kilometers away, around the three-city area of Shahjahanpur, Badaun, and Hardoi.
An eight-member team of researchers led by Kara found that in this area child labor was rampant, chronic, and almost entirely in deeply rural Muslim villages. The vast majority of the children doing the carpet weaving were females, unlike the rest of the state where where the weavers are usually young boys.
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