Children of the Black Dust | Child Labor in Bangladesh
July 22, 2011
There are hundreds of informal factories and workshops inside and on the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The industry employs thousands of women and children. All day long women and children break used batteries to get reusable parts and tiny pieces of metal out of them. Once separated, these materials are sent to battery manufacturing factories and workshops that either reuse them or melt them to make other useful materials.
While breaking used batteries, or even playing, children inhale millions of fine carbon dust particles from the batteries throughout the day. Depending on how much work they do, each of them get between Taka 5-15 per day (US $1.00=Taka 60). It takes a young child 4-12 days to earn just one US dollar.
Hello Shehzad Noorani,
My name is Junaid and I am a student. I recently came across a video on youtube with the subjec title above. There i found some information about how some people Bangladesh work in inhumane conditions and are earning their living by processing the D-Cell batteries to get the carbon rods out of these batteries.
I thouhgt about it and have designed a device that can easily push the carbon rod out of a D-Cell battery and will reduce the labour of these children and girls and women many folds.
I don’t know which part of Bangladesh you live in. Can you please do me a favor. Can you find where these kids work. I want to introduce the device that i have invented and probably i can also support some of them to get this device free of cost.
Here is the youtube video link and a CNN report about it.
Waiting to hear from you very soon
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/28/what.matters.dust/
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Children+of+the+black+dust+bangladesh
Many thanks
Junaid Malik
Austria
Hey Is there a return to your project? I’m so curious.
Years have passed, I hope you helped those people my friend.
This story and these pictures used to be accompanied by the story about how these children used to work under better conditions in garment factories. Bad conditions by Western standards, but better than what they are doing now. Then political pressure from America forced the garment factories to lay off these children. Because the children still needed to work in order to eat, because Bangladesh is a poor country, they ended up in these worse jobs. Or prostitution.
Why has that been dropped? Its an important lesson we need to learn. If you take away the best option that people have, however bad it is, they are left with worse options.