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Girl in bangles sorting a stack of printed matchbox labels in her lap

Sivakasi

Child Labor in Sivakasi, India

August 2004

Bread&Water operated from 1998 to 2005 as an independent not-for-profit organization focused on poverty alleviation. In 2004, Amanda Fornal traveled to southern India as part of a three-person team producing a short documentary in cooperation with one of the organizations Bread&Water supported: a school working to keep children out of child labor. The project documented child labor, poverty, and educational initiatives in Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu.

Sivakasi has long been associated with the manufacture of matches, fireworks, and printed materials. Child labor in hazardous industries in the region had already become the subject of government, nonprofit, and international intervention by the time of the project.

The field team visited cottage-industry workplaces and communities affected by generational poverty. It also documented a school working to keep children in education. The school provided classroom instruction and a midday meal, helping to reduce some of the economic pressures that could lead families to send children to work.

The resulting film, Touch the Untouchables, was created to help Bread&Water communicate to donors the conditions affecting children in the region and the work of the educational project supported by the organization.

Crowd of children pressing toward the camera, hands raised and reaching
Brightly coloured plastic water pots queued in a line at a street tap
Schoolchildren packed together with hands raised, in black and white
Children seated in a long row eating a midday meal from steel bowls
Young girl in a checked school pinafore holding a steel bowl
Girl in a blue embroidered dress holding a pencil and slip of paper in class
Boys in checked school uniforms and striped ties writing in notebooks
Worker balancing a large jute-wrapped bale on his head beside a painted truck
Man in a turban shifting jute-wrapped bales stacked high on a truck bed
Black-and-white portrait of an older man with a checked cloth over his shoulder
Heap of purple matchbox covers with wooden inner trays
Woman in a green sari folding purple matchbox card on a low wooden board
Hands wrapping purple paper around a wooden matchbox tray on a glue-smeared board
Woman assembling matchboxes on a workshop floor strewn with wood splints and baskets
Two women making matchboxes among wicker baskets in a blue-walled room
Printing worker stitching stacks of illustrated booklets on a wire-stitching machine
Teenage boy feeding printed sheets into a stitching machine as men look on
Boy turning the handwheel of a paper-cutting machine beside a man at work
Schoolboy on a bicycle glancing back, a bullock cart passing behind him
Boy in a pale checked shirt folding small paper boxes beside a clay pot
Boy in a white vest assembling a small paper box while seated among adults
Bamboo basket heaped with blue-green cardboard box halves and cut paper
Man in a cloth headwrap beside a truck hung with coiled ropes
Porter balancing a bulging jute bale of wood splints on his head
Turbaned man working among jute bales stacked high on a truck bed
Hands wrapping a small box in purple paper on a glue-stained board
Young worker binding printed pages by machine in a cramped print shop
Children crowding together in a home kitchen with brass and pink water pots
Blue-washed courtyard with a mud cookstove, metal pots and a rusted door
Grinning boy holding up one finger, other children seated beside him
Heap of empty purple matchbox sleeves waiting to be filled
Matchboxes labelled "Lion Super impregnated safety matches" piled in a bin
Worker in a red sari bent over a wooden frame holding rows of match splints
Young man in a vest holding up a frame of freshly dipped matches
Frame of dipped matches drying on a rack against a peeling wall
Wooden racks stacked with match frames drying in a workshop
Blue and red matchbox blanks spilling from a stacked wall onto a sack
Purple matchbox shells stacked in tight rows on a wooden tray
Hands gathering matchsticks from a filled frame to pack into a box
Women and girls sitting on the floor of a workshop filling matchboxes
Hands fanning a thick stack of matchbox labels with striking strips
Girl in bangles sorting a stack of printed matchbox labels in her lap
Child sitting cross-legged on the ground beside a heap of finished matchboxes
Child frowning at the camera while packing a matchbox with matchsticks

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