Why India's brick kiln workers 'live like slaves'

In the world of the consumer we never seem to ask where the products we cherish come from or who makes them.  All we care about is how cheap these products are and whether they will make our lives easier or perhaps more manageable.   Yet, those who manufacture these prized must have consumer products are often exploited in the name of profit.    

Just outside of the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, by country roads in a flat green landscape, smoke rises off huge furnaces.
The heat hardens mud clay into the bricks that are making modern India.
Close by the air is acrid with coal soot, catching in the throat.
Like a scene from a long-gone age, men and women walk in single file up and down steps as if climbing a pyramid. They strain under a load, balanced in yoke-like hods, to deliver freshly-moulded bricks to the furnace.

Here we are in the 21 century and one doesn't need to travel  through time to find images that conjure up what life might have been like for the slave laborers that constructed the pyramids of Egypt they just have to travel to India.

  "All of this is against the law," says Aeshalla Krishna, a labour activist with the human rights group Prayas."This is against the minimum wage act of 1948, the bonded labour act of 1976, the interstate migrant workers act of 1979. Child labour. Sexual harassment. Physical abuse. It's all happening. Every day."
The bricks are used to build offices, factories and call centres, the cityscapes of a booming economic miracle, and more and more, these buildings are used by multi-national companies with a global reach.

It doesn't matter that it's against the  law what matters is that modern India is emerging through the abusive labor practices of corporations whose only goal is higher profits and happy shareholders.

Children were everywhere. There was no safety equipment. Stories of illness, withheld wages and other issues were common place.
"They work 12 to 18 hours a day, pregnant women, children, adolescent girls," says Mr Krishna. "Their diet is poor. There is no good water. They live like slaves."
The situation has been like this for decades, if not centuries. Until recently, it was widely accepted as something that would improve slowly time. Campaigners say there's been little sense of urgency.

Though children are being denied an education or any type of future other than working in those kilns to manufacture bricks isn't important money is.