FASTRising

admin 9 September 2008 Poverty, Welfare 662 views One Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

Flour distribution at a brick kiln in the outskirts of Lahore

With apologies for the delay, here are the the details of the last round of flour distribution:

Thanks are due to a fellow activist from Islamabad who managed to convince a flour mill in Lahore to sell us 50 bags.

The mill is located at Daroghay-wala near Baghbaanpura, about 5 kms from Shalamar gardens, an area none of us had seen before. We went there at about 11AM, bought 50 bags of 20kg @ Rs. 365 a bag, and then headed to Mohlanwaal (the other end of Lahore!). The journey took about an hour.

The flour (49 of the 50 bags from the mill plus 4 bags of 10kg each procured from a shop in Cavalry Grounds) was then distributed among the kiln workers. One bag was reserved for the quality check requested earlier by an observant reader. The rotis made from the flour were declared good by the official tasting committee appointed especially for the purpose.

One member of our team, meanwhile, tried to engage 2-3 workers in chit-chat (away from the munshi, the management representative) and asked questions like

• is the flour distribution mechanism transparent? Ans: Yes
• is the brick kiln management indulging in some favoritism? Ans: No
• Is there any bonded labor in the area? Ans: No
• What are the wages? Ans: making bricks is a labor intensive job and usually the whole family (including kids) has to work together. The wages vary between 350-400 Rs per thousand bricks and a family just barely manages to produce a thousand bricks a day. This earns them about Rs. 10,000 a month provided there is no rainy day in the month! If there is rain, it means suspension of work for at least 2-3 days. e.g. due to recent rain spell, the workers were without work for about a week and had to resort to borrowing from the munshi to buy the items of basic need from the only general store (an improvised khokha). Obviously the children don’t go to school there for they work with their parents!

There is little that FASTRising can do for the “uplift” (to borrow the term from NGO literature) of these workers but we hope that at least we keep providing free flour to these families in the months to come.

Images from the procurement and distribution activities available here.