India's tobacco girls: "It must stop with me"

Extreme poverty, lack of education and scant livelihood opportunities have for generations forced hundreds of families in the town of Kadiri in India's Andhra Pradesh to rely on beedi rolling as their only means of survival. Slum clusters in Kadiri have become open-air factories of domestic tobacco industry where women and girls as young as five roll tonnes of tobacco into cigarettes with bare hands and sharp knives daily. They live in crammed, unhygienic conditions, work in oppressive heat, inhale harmful tobacco vapours, and absorb large amounts of nicotine through skin contact. Here is one tobacco girl's story: 

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India’s tobacco girls

Five-year-old Aliya thinks it is some kind of game which she will soon have to master. From the time she wakes up until she goes to bed Aliya watches her mother and all the other girls and women in her neighbourhood engaged in a frantic race. They all make beedis – traditional hand-rolled Indian cigarettes.

To assemble each beedi, the roller painstakingly places tobacco inside a dried leaf from a local tree, tightly rolls and secures it with a thread, and then closes the tips using a sharp knife. For anything between 10 and 14 hours every day, Aliya’s mother and the others must each roll at least 1,000 beedis to earn less than $2 (about £1.30), paid by a middleman.

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Hard work, long hours and little pay

This research on tobacco farms in Malawi reveals that child labourers, some as young as 5, are suffering severe physical symptoms from absorbing up to the equivalent of 50 cigarettes a day through their skin.

As the tobacco industry continues to shift its production to developing countries, more vulnerable children are being exposed to these hazardous working conditions.

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Indien - Tobacco Piger

Five-year-old Aliya thinks it is some kind of a game she must soon master to be a winner. From the time she wakes up till she goes to bed Aliya watches her mother and all girls and women in her neighbourhood consumed in a frantic race. They all make beedis – the traditional hand-rolled Indian cigarettes.

For each beedi, the roller painstakingly places tobacco inside a dried leaf sourced from a local ebony tree; tightly rolls and secures it with a thread; and then closes the tips using a sharp knife. For anything between 10 and 14 hours, regardless of how long it takes, Aliya's mother and others must all roll at least a 1000 beedis to earn a paltry sum of less than 2 dollars paid by the middleman. The beedi manufacturers, however, make billions of dollars.

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