Further into the quarries

We now leave Kota and head for the quarry areas. Just as we leave the city on National Route 76 we pass a whole area of stalls selling cricket equipment. The road may well be called National Route 76 but it quickly changes from a wide asphalt road to little more than a single track.

As we get into the quarrying area we see the environmental impact of the activities, this photos was taken on the road just outside Dhansear.

We continue on N76 to Sutra past many huge worked out quarries. This one is now being picked over by migrant families making paving slabs out of the remains.

These slabs are destined for the stone mundi (market) where they could end up anywhere, local use, mainland Europe or the UK.

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This is another important reason why we work with Stoneshippers India to keep the supply chain closed, from block extraction, transport to the masons yards for splitting and working into slabs, to processing (calibration to the right thickness) and packaging. If you don’t control the supply chain like this then there is no way of being certain that the stone has been produced ethically.

In the outskirts of Sutra we see that before the quarries much of this area was farmland and potentially could be again with the right forms of rectification.

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This photo shows fertile fields with spoil heaps behind it, and another showing the effect of these spoil heaps.

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We next come to Dabi where we stop for a break. The Stoneshippers India guys stop at the street food vendors and have cups of Chai and samosas. I don’t join in with the street food. I don’t think that my constitution is strong enough to cope with Dabi street food and the thought of spending 12 hours in a car miles from ‘facilities’ on bumpy roads with a dodgy stomach is not one I want to risk!

But we do buy some local fruit ( with thick skins ) called Chikoo, they are about the size of golf balls light brown skins with a fibrous fleshy inside that tastes like a cross between banana and dates; delicious. I have seen these in my local Tesco’s costing 20 times as much.

On leaving Dabi we head towards Parana and back into quarrying country. I am very interested in the issue of legal vs. illegal quarries. I have seen many times now that unless the supply chain is tightly controlled there is no way to trace back the source of and paving that is for sale in the UK to either a legal / illegal quarry or to the use of child labour. This makes any claims of ‘no child labour’ impossible to substantiate unless they go to the lengths we do.

This photo shows the licence for a quarry at the side of the National Route 76 near Parana. Essentially it states:

• The location
• The licensee’s name
• The area of the quarry, in this case 11,256 m2
• The start and end date of the licence: 25th Sept 1998 to 24th May 2018
• The Annual fee: R22,512 or about; 265 a year.

To me this quarry seems to be a little bit bigger than 11,000 m2. The photo shows about; the area. We are now entering the Budhpura area that I have visited several times so we continue further along the road; the same disturbing Budhpura sights greet us. There are gangs of children (top left) working on the spoil heaps making sett paving; there are also very clear signs of land slips. These setts, used for paths and driveways, are only made for the export market, the UK and mainland Europe; unfortunately anyone buying these setts in the UK from a non Marshalls source will have a product that has been made using child labour. These sights just reinforce our decision to make all setts in house; it really is the only way to guarantee that there has been non child labour involved.

Further along the road towards Dhorela, we see gang after gang of migrant worker families removing spoil and waste. The agreement we have with the Hadoti NGO is directly concerned with these migrant families and their welfare.

This should not be the responsibility of a UK company that represents such a small part of the output of the natural stone industry in India. 5% of total production is exported, of which 20% is destined for the UK, of which Marshalls have a 20% share – So we are just 0.2% of the production for the whole of India.

But someone has to look to their welfare; small changes can make big difference and it is simply wrong to think that the problems are too big or complicated to tackle. Anyone who advocates doing nothing or being ‘slightly ethical’ are deluding themselves and are complicit in the abuses that are prevalent in this region.

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