Rain, debt, and uncounted bricks: unseasonal showers drowns brick kiln workers' livelihoods

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 molded 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 molded 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 labor-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-molder from Madhubani, Bihar.

"Everything got washed away. Now we're borrowing rice from the kiln owner. We'll repay with labor, 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.

Many workers are brought in by middlemen offering advances. Once at the site, they can't leave.

"If we try to leave mid-season, the kiln owners reduce our wages or delay our payment. Even in case of emergencies, we are told, 'Go if you want, but your payment will be halved,'" said Ram Kumar, a brick kiln worker in Kodiaganj, who could not return to his home in Gaya, Bihar, when his father passed away last year.

To add to this, unseasonal rain is deepening the crisis.

Workers borrow rations and medicines from the kiln owners. These debts – locally called toot – roll over from one season to the next.

"Sometimes, we return the following year just to clear last season's debt," said Kumar.

While workers bear the immediate brunt of lost wages, kiln owners say they, too, face losses due to unseasonal rain, though of a different kind.

Delays in delivery schedules, rising fuel costs, and client penalties are some of the financial pressures they cite when explaining why they cannot compensate laborers for ruined bricks.

"We don't want to see anyone's work go to waste, but this is outdoor work – we can't control the weather," said Rajveer Singh, who owns a medium-sized brick kiln called KKK Bricks in Bulandshahr.

"If it rains, we also suffer losses in coal, production delays, and delivery penalties. Still, it's hard to pay for bricks that are no longer usable," he said.

The threat of sudden showers is not just seasonal – it is structural, and increasingly linked to climate change.

According to a 2024 analysis by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), 55 per cent of Indian sub-districts saw over a 10 per cent rise in southwest monsoon rainfall events from 2012–2022, largely due to short, intense rainfall typical of climate-change dynamics.

These changes have disrupted agricultural and informal labor cycles that once revolved around predictable weather.

Experts argue the burden of climate-linked disruptions must not be passed onto the workers.

"Once a brick is molded, the worker has done his job. If the brick is damaged due to rain, the employer should bear that loss – not the laborer," Shrivastav (general secretary of Mazdoor Adhikar Manch) said.

Under the Interstate Migrant Workmen Act, workers are entitled to full wages from the point of recruitment until the end of service. But enforcement remains poor.

"Most workers aren't even aware of their rights. Those who are, have no access to legal help or grievance systems, especially when far from home," said Gorana, convenor of the National Campaign Committee for the Eradication of Bonded Labour.

He and others are calling for a climate-adaptive wage protection scheme that compensates informal workers whose income is lost due to extreme weather events.

Back in Bulandshahr, Vishnu, 35, stands near a heap of cracked, muddy bricks. His youngest child is running a fever, and there's no money for medicine.

"We don't control the clouds, but someone should care that we lose so much when it rains," he said.