Meet the Journalist Ensuring 3000+ Children in Bihar’s Kilns Hold Books Instead of Bricks

“If these children start studying, then who will make the bricks? Do you expect our children to work at the kilns?”

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Jharkhand native Anshu Jaiswal couldn’t believe his ears. 

He’d just finished pitching his idea of the ‘Akshar Learning Centres’ — on-site education hubs in brick kilns of Bihar that would target children’s foundational literacy in mathematics and Hindi — to the contractors. 

The absurdity of their response appalled him. He realised it was this mentality that consigned thousands of innocent children to the waiting room of education. To these contractors, the children were easy labour. 

Their parents didn’t fault the system either. 

Extra hands — tiny as they might be — meant extra income: a vital resource to these families, Anshu points out, reasoning that a majority of them belong to the Musahar community, which continues to live on the fringes of dignity long after the abolishment of the caste system. 

Food and respect are rare commodities. Most days, they rely on rats, grains, small fish, snails and cockroaches. 

And where a respectable meal is tough to come across, education is but a fantasy. 

It was during the COVID-19-induced lockdown that Anshu observed this crisis burgeoning in the state, which was doing its best to brave the throes of the migrant influx. 

He found himself in brick kilns, attempting to understand the plight of these migrants. The unfairness of things was not lost on him; the children’s stories were punctuated by frequent migrations, stress, and the obligation to trade their childhood to help their parents eke out a living. 

That’s where Anshu, through the Neev Ki Eent Foundation, decided to return these children to their childhoods.  

Where books are substituting bricks across the kilns of Bihar 

In Bihar’s Sasaram, the air is thick with the scent of clay and struggle. Chandni (10) coughs as dust finds its way into her tiny nostrils. A few years ago, she wouldn’t have even noticed the pungent air. But now, since she spends more of her time in school than in the kiln, she is sensitive to the dust. 

As Chandni flips the pages of her textbook — its whites have started browning — she shares how her life changed overnight when one of the Swabhimaan Fellows (the local youth part of the foundation who volunteer at the brick kilns) started teaching at her kiln. Chandni’s voice seems animated as she talks about the present, but the pain of the past is evident in the scars on her hand. 

“I always wanted to study, to play,” Chandni shares. “But mummy papa used to say ‘Chandni, if you don’t make bricks, what will we eat? We will go hungry.’.” So, Chandni had to work. Her story finds echoes in hundreds of similar ones, each underscoring the inhumanity of child labour. 

Elaborating on it, Anshu shares, “These families work for 12-15 hours a day in extreme heat and cold in winter. They are denied fair wages. Children as young as 5-14 years are forced to work, spending their childhood carrying bricks and moulding clay.” 

Many of the families lack an identity — Aadhaar cards, ration cards, and voter IDs. “They are invisible in government records and excluded from social security schemes. To add to this, the kilns are hazardous, the children are malnourished, and there is so much poverty among them,” Anshu adds. 

The sad reality is that, behind every brick that builds our cities, there is an untold story. “There is a child and a family that lives without rights or opportunities,” he notes. And, it is this generational trap that Anshu wanted to free the children from when he started the foundation in 2023. 

He wanted to assure every child the right to education, every worker dignity, and every family freedom. And the bedrock for this is the foundation’s three-pillar approach — awareness, education, and empowerment. 

Handing children a blank slate to script a new story 

Around 65-80 percent of children under fourteen work for an average of nine hours a day in the summer months in brick kilns, a report and documentary by Anti-Slavery International found. Around 77 percent of workers reported not having access to primary education for their children between 5-13 years of age. Imagine this reality playing out across 100,000 functioning brick kilns and an estimated 23 million workers. 

Anshu couldn’t bear the thought of it. 

But to scale his entrepreneurial model, he needed support that transcended funds. And that’s where TFIx stepped in. The incubation program by Teach For India is tailor-made for educational entrepreneurs to launch and sustain a high-impact teaching fellowship in some of the most marginalised, tribal, and remote regions of the country. 

The three-stage support system includes a pre-incubation stage where education entrepreneurs are prepared for selection, an incubation stage that helps them launch their fellowships and a post-incubation stage that helps them sustain and strengthen their programs.

Anshu was part of the 2024-2025 cohort and one of the 10 entrepreneurs who were given the wherewithal to scale their idea into reality.  

Impact is a ripple effect. 

Last year alone, over 400 children were enrolled in the Akshar Learning Centres, while over 250 families were supported with identity documents and social security schemes. One of them was Bubbly Kumari’s family. 

Bubbly proudly tells anyone who listens that she can count all the way to 100. The 8-year-old is chatty but shuffles at questions about her past. This is because, while Bubbly is proud of her mathematical acumen, she hates the way she was taught. Unlike other children, Bubbly wasn’t shown flash cards and games. Instead, she learnt numbers as she flipped over bricks, to dry them in the sunlight. She needed to keep a tally. 

Now, in most of these kilns, children are beginning to learn math the right way. 

Anshu’s learning centres are to credit. He emphasises that the centres weren’t designed to function parallel to the mainstream schooling system but instead to become integrated with it.

“The aim of the foundational literacy centres is to prepare children to enter or rejoin mainstream schools. We focus on mathematics and Hindi as the core competencies.” He reasons that the goal isn’t to measure success by the fundamental yardsticks of education. 

“The children receive career guidance and skill development support, so they can pursue higher education or meaningful careers beyond the kilns.” And the impact has touched over 3000 children. 

As per the 2011 Census, the total child population in India in the age group 5-14 years is 259.6 million. Of these, 10.1 million (3.9 percent of the total child population) are working, and more than 42.7 million children in India were found to be out of school. 

Through his idea, Anshu wants to make a case in point for how even the dustiest paths can lead to bright futures. 

All pictures courtesy Anshu Jaiswal

Sources 

'FACT SHEET: Child labour in India': Published by International Labour Organization.