Unseasonal showers drown brick kiln workers’ livelihoods in Uttar Pradesh

Aligarh/Bulandshahr: “Just one spell of rain, and a week’s work is gone,” said Ramvati, sitting beside a half-formed row of soggy bricks outside her home in the western UP village of Nanau.

She and her husband had moulded 1,600 bricks over two days – none of them counted, none paid for. The light drizzle lasted only a few hours, but it wiped out five days of their wages.

March to June are traditionally the most productive months for brick kiln workers in western Uttar Pradesh, as the clear, scorching days provide ideal conditions for drying moulded bricks under the open sky.

But in recent years, that critical window has been lost due to unseasonal rains and hailstorms.

“There were barely 15 to 20 days of proper sunshine in May and June combined,” said Ramesh Singh, a kiln supervisor in Bulandshahr.

The rest of the days were marked by cloudy skies, high humidity, or sudden rain – conditions that turned drying fields into slush and halted production repeatedly.

As a result, workers lost not only bricks but also their most profitable working weeks of the season.

For thousands of interstate migrants from Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and eastern UP who power this labour-intensive industry, a single spell of untimely rain has now become more than an inconvenience – it’s an economic disaster.

“We had worked three days straight, and then it rained,” said Saroj, a 30-year-old brick-moulder from Madhubani, Bihar.

“Everything got washed away. Now we’re borrowing rice from the kiln owner. We’ll repay with labour, but it means less money left to send home,” he added.

Ramesh Shrivastav, general secretary of the Mazdoor Adhikar Manch, said the impact of that two-hour rain lasts for nearly a week.

“You can’t work on a wet field. It takes four dry days for the soil to be ready again,” he said.

Most workers are paid by the piece – about Rs 676 per 1,000 bricks, as per the 2024 rate. But in practice, many receive even less.

“They are often paid Rs 500 or lower. And if the bricks are destroyed by rain and not counted, they are not paid at all,” said Nirmal Gorana, convenor of the National Campaign Committee for the Eradication of Bonded Labour, who has extensively documented labour conditions in kilns.

In kiln-speak, the loss caused by rain is called phemaish – work that is wasted.

“It’s not just the two days of brick-molding that’s lost. The entire site becomes unusable for four to five days. That’s nearly a week of lost wages. And these are people already living hand-to-mouth,” said Gorana.

Each pair of Patheras, usually husband and wife, can mold up to 1,800 bricks a day. So, when it rains, the loss per pair is around Rs 1,200 or more, not including the days it takes to resume work.

“In our kiln, a drizzle destroyed bricks worth Rs 12,000 in a single night. But no worker was compensated,” said Ramvati.

Traditionally, migrant brick kiln workers return to their villages during the monsoon months when production slows, and drying bricks becomes unfeasible.

They return in winters when operations resume and the weather is reliably dry. This predictable migration pattern has long structured their lives, allowing them to plan agricultural work back home or enroll their children in school during the off-season.

But unseasonal rain is breaking that rhythm. Some workers stay longer into the summer to maximize income, only to be caught off guard by unexpected pre-monsoon showers that destroy their work.

Others return early but are called back mid-season when dry spells reappear. The climate’s growing unpredictability is now reshaping even this deeply rooted cycle of

movement.