NEPALGUNJ, Dec 28: With mercury dipping, the children from the economically backward community have been hit hard. The children staying in various brick kilns with their parents are suffering from common cold, pneumonia and so on due to cold wave in recent days.
Indian labourers working at the local brick factories stay with their children. Due to extreme poverty, they rarely afford warm clothes for their kids. While parents are busy at work throughout the day, their children are compelled to spend their days shivering in the cold. One of the workers at Kisan Brick Factory Aarif Salmani lamented, “We find it really hard to protect our kids from cold. We can’t buy them warm clothes as it is difficult to make our ends meet with meager income from this work.”
Salmani has come to earn his bread and butter from Sitapur of India with his wife, a son and a daughter. According to him, there are about 40 children at Kisan Brick Factory alone.
The children who have been staying at the factory premises don’t go to school either. Their parents rarely have time for caring about their sanitation. They play in the mud and suffer from different seasonal diseases.