Children Toil in Poverty to Produce India’s Bidi Cigarettes
Loophole keeps kids working in tobacco industry and out of school
Editor
Mar 20, 2012
Sagira Ansari suffers from coughs, colds, fever and persistent headaches. But her ailments do not shorten her workday or slow her as she drops flakes of tobacco into square-cut leaves, rolls them deftly and ties the ends of a bidi cigarette with twists of red thread.
"I can't play around," she laments in a story by the Associated Press.
At age 11, Sagira, is surrounded by dust as she works eight-hour shifts producing bidis, a popular form of tobacco smoked mostly by men in India — but made by women and children.
Continue reading Children Toil in Poverty to Produce India’s Bidi Cigarettes


