Poverty's vicious circle

People Like Them

"The first thing that struck me when I began working as a child of ten was that my salary was almost double that of my father," said Ishrat Mian, as we chatted about his experiences as a child worker in the carpet business in Lakhanpur, a small village in Mirzapur district.

"But it was a miserable life, all I did was cry because the work was hard and long, cry for my mother who had recently died and cry because I had no choice but to work," he said sadly.

His father was finding it tough to support six children and so he apprenticed Ishrat, the eldest, to an ustad, or teacher, who taught him the difficult art of "embossing", or snipping excess pile from a finished carpet to accentuate the design.

"My abba, father, worked in the same trade, but wasn't skilled, so he earned about Rs 80 a month. I started off at Rs 120 per month, and soon began bringing home as much as Rs 160 as my fingers became nimbler," he recounted.

Those days were hard, Ishrat Mian said, and the work was exacting and long."I used to work from 7 am to 1 pm, and then after lunch from 2 to 6 pm," said he, adding, "there was no time to play, I returned too exhausted from work to want to, and there was certainly no time to study".

The vicious circle of poverty dragged him deeper within when his father died, leaving three underage siblings for Ishrat Mian to support.

"I just had to work harder," he said, and by the time he was twenty, his ten years of experience and nimble fingers made him one of the most skilled embossers in the village.

Poverty, and perhaps the fact that Ishrat began working so early in life, have caused his body to wear out long before its time.

His gaunt face and sunken chest make him look much older than fifty-four, and tuberculosis has lowered his life expectancy considerably.

"Today, my illness has made it impossible for me to work. If my wife and I manage to eat one square meal a day, it is thanks to our neighbours in Lakhanpur village," said he.

But they've not been successful in convincing him to take the full course of his TB medicine, without which his health will not improve.

"The government hospital, which is supposed to provide people like me with free medicine, says it is out of stock. And the entire treatment costs Rs 2,000 privately, which I can't afford in my wildest dreams," he said.

"I'm caught in a vicious circle "" poverty makes it impossible for me to get good treatment for TB, and it is TB that has kept me poor."

Ishrat Mian has no children, a fact that causes him much distress. "But if I did, and could afford it, I'd have ensured that they had a better childhood than mine," he said.

Ishrat Mian believes that his present circumstances have little to do with the fact that he began work four years before the legal age.

"Having to work when I was ten was a compulsion, said he, "anyway, skills such as mine are best learnt in childhood, when the brain is most receptive to new ideas," said he reflectively, "and perhaps older people can never learn them as proficiently."

What would he have liked to do instead of working from the age of ten, I asked.

"What a question!" he exclaimed, "If I hadn't begun to work when I did, I'd probably be dead instead of sitting here and talking to you!"