Little hands at the liquor still: How children were reportedly made to work making and bottling liquor in a factory in MP
Som Distilleries at Sehatganj village in Raisen, Madhya Pradesh. He calls his work “pauwa jamana”— setting the bottles upright so that alcohol falls into them. He did that for nine hours a day.
Wearing jeans and tee shirt, Vineet sits with a slight stoop at his home. He says he dropped out of school. Instead of going to class, the thin boy would reach the distillery at 8 am and work till 5 pm. After a long day of strenuous, hazardous work, he would go home with Rs 350. He saw the hands of his friends had turned white, the skin had peeled. “It could have been the chemicals,” he says. He worked there only for a fortnight. Before he had to spend more days in that reeking plant, before his hands too got scalded, he was rescued.
On June 15, a team of officials of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) and Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), a nonprofit founded by Kailash Satyarthi, rescued 59 children—39 boys and 20 girls—from the distillery, in the biggest busting of child labour racket in the liquor industry in the past several years. About 40 other children “escaped” during the raid, according to officials at the rescue operation.
Almost 100 children, aged between 12 and 17 years, were allegedly employed by country-liquor maker Som Distilleries at its Raisen plant. The company is part of the Som Group that also owns the listed entity Som Distilleries and Breweries, which is among the 10 biggest distillers in India and the largest in Madhya Pradesh. For years, the children were allegedly brought
