Shown here is a backhoe loader mountee on a tractor and loading salt onto a truck to be transported across and out of the Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India. As the truck takes a turn, many kilos of salt pour out of it! What earth to earth, dust to dust...?
The salt workers settle down in the desert for 8 months between October to May and their homes adjacent to the salt pans that they work on. Every year there homes are destroyed by the monsoon and they have to rebuild them during their working season. All the workers stay near their salt pans and work in harsh sun to extract salt in the Little Rann of Kutch.
"Not many know that salt works begin where civilization ends that salt pans lie in coastal and desert areas under a pitiless scorching sun that some 150 000 salt workers in India and their families (perhaps half a million people in all) live for eight months a year in this harsh environment that's often devoid of basic amenities such as drinking water, schools, hospitals or markets; that they do the toughest of manual jobs, risking blindness, blood pressure, skin lesions, knee injury, back pain and exhaustion, and epidemics such as malaria; that most salt worker children are school dropouts, and are vulnerable to chronic cough and tuberculosis; that despite such living conditions, salt workers are paid low wages, and suffer vile exploitation at the hands of the many intermediaries in the saltbusiness, including money-lenders.Little wonder that they seek to drown their sorrows in alcohol or blow them away with smoke -- further aggravating their problems. Perhaps the cruel landscape of the Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat best exemplifies the plight of India's salt workers. This area has a lot of underground saline water. Extracting salt from it is a business opportunity tapped by some 1 500 small and large salt pans, mainly in Surendranagar and Patan districts. Some 15 000 families -- merchants, agarias (salt workers cumentrepreneurs) labourers -- farm salt here during the September-March season. Many of them live here for eight months, setting up small grassroofed shacks. Little children grow up playing in salty water under the blazing sun, sometimes helping out their parents in the salt pans with sundry jobs."
Source - http://www.bobpigo.org/bbn/march_06/Page%2037-40.pdf
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