Pakistan's Brick Kilns: Millions Trapped in Slavery

Travel the Grand Trunk Road from Lahore to Islamabad, and count the chimneys—one every few kilometers, tall brick towers regularly pumping thick, dark smoke into Punjab’s already polluted skies. These mark more than just sites of environmental issues, though—each one marks a place where Pakistani law largely doesn’t apply.

Beneath each chimney, the scene repeats with truly industrial precision: families hunched over brick-shaped molds, packing wet clay into them over and over, from dawn to dusk. And when we say families, we mean it—children barely tall enough to see over the brick stacks work alongside their parents and grandparents whose backs are permanently bent from decades of this labor. Children as young as five years old are documented to be working nearly full-time in these conditions, spending hours wading through mud pits to mix clay with their bare hands and feet.

This is where over an estimated 3.2 million people are enslaved in debt bondage that Pakistan officially abolished in 1992—yet you wouldn’t know it from the practices here. Families arrive needing a few hundred dollars to cover emergencies like medical expenses. They sign contracts with thumbprints—most can’t read what they’re agreeing to, if anything written is shown to them at all—and discover all too late that the terms make escape mathematically impossible. Over a million of these workers are children, inheriting debts their parents signed before they were even born.

This is the story of how Pakistan’s brick industry transformed emergency loans into generational debt slavery—and why nobody with power has put a stop to it.

The Peshgi System

These kilns occupy the peripheral zones of Pakistan’s major cities for shrewd reasons. Transportation costs demand proximity to urban construction markets, and the Indus River’s clay-rich plains provide raw materials on the one hand. On the other hand, being on the outskirts keeps them removed from the daily life of the city, putting them just far enough away that law enforcement are able to turn a blind eye towards what’s going on here, ensuring that Pakistani labor law exists more as a theoretical framework rather than a strictly enforced reality. Half of Pakistan’s kilns cluster in Punjab province, transforming the edges of Lahore, Faisalabad, and Kasur into carefully managed zones where the state’s authority ends and the kiln’s owners begin.

The system that traps millions today dates back to the early 20th century, and wasn’t unique to the country—debt peonage was relatively common, and neighbors including India also saw this same dynamic. But what happened after 1947 belongs entirely to Pakistan: the chaos of mass migration during the partition created enormous reconstruction needs, with millions of refugees requiring shelter. The country’s elites seized the opportunity to expand the kilns rapidly, and they’ve maintained control over them ever since.

That expansion created the infrastructure, but the system’s persistence depends on something more basic: desperate families who need cash and have nowhere else to turn. Forty-one-year-old Faisal spent 25 years learning how this trap operates from the inside, looking out. His story began in Rawalpindi with a simple fact that defines millions of Pakistani lives: his father couldn’t find a job, and they needed the money to keep a roof over their head.

In his own words, “There is no other way for people like us to get money.” Another kiln worker in the same report went on record as saying that “Once you ask for a loan, you become a debtor forever.”

Receiving the first loan—through a system Pakistanis call peshgi, or advance payment—felt like the answer to all of their problems, or at least it did at first. Cash in hand to meet immediate needs in exchange for work that required no education or connections, just strong muscle and work ethic. The deal is struck with a handshake or occasionally a thumbprint as a form of signature—used in lieu of a written one as illiteracy is widespread here. The vast majority of bonded laborers either never sign anything or have no idea what they are signing themselves up for, they just accept the owner’s word that they’ll work until the debt is repaid.

The advances—typically between 50,000 and 250,000 rupees, between roughly $160 and $900, occasionally ranging into a few thousand dollars—seems manageable at first, but the maths of peshgi ensure that escape becomes nearly impossible. Owners keep the ledgers that workers never see, and frequently add charges for coal, water, broken bricks, tools, or anything else they can think of to keep the balance growing rather than falling.

This moment of realization came later, when Faisal returned to the kiln owner to request a second advance. “I didn’t realize I was not a free person until I asked for a second loan from the owner,” he recalls. Once you ask for a loan, you become a debtor forever.

Sharif Masih’s daily reality in Faisalabad is another case study in and of itself. This forty-two-year-old worker, born into kiln debt and fully expecting to die in it, provides a window into the impossible maths that perpetuate this system across generations. Four years ago, Sharif was sold to another brick kiln owner without consultation, just uprooted and expected to move. The most financially significant thing he brought with him was the debt.

At his current kiln, Sharif’s family of six produces roughly 1,000 bricks every two days, earning them 1,200 rupees—but the owner immediately claims half for debt repayment, leaving precious little to feed six mouths.

The seasonal nature of this system makes it even harder to escape from. Pakistan has extremely volatile seasons, and the monsoons make the outdoor production process next to impossible. The kilns grind to a halt and shut down for weeks at a time. Sharif and nearly everyone else in his position have zero income during these periods, and thus have to borrow even more from the kiln owner just to survive. He openly admits that he has no idea how much debt there is left to pay off.

Some workers attempt to escape through measures that only deepen the tragedy—workers have begun to sell kidneys in an attempt to clear their debt, only to find themselves still trapped in what really must be described as slavery and has transformed Pakistan into what critics refer to as a “kidney bazaar” where organs become currency in the economy of desperation. The fact that such desperate measures persist more than three decades after officially abolishing such a system reveals how completely the legal framework designed to end bondage has failed to penetrate the reality of the kilns.

Political Protection and Legal Failure

Understanding why this system persists requires examining not just the economics of debt, but also the political architecture that protects it. The technological evolution of kilns over the past decade reveals how the system has truly industrialized this exploitation while simultaneously demonstrating where Pakistan’s government can enforce change when it chooses to—and where it chooses not to. Between 2017 and 2020, over 7,000 kilns in Punjab converted from their traditional approach to what’s called “zigzag,” as part of an environmental mandate to combat smog.

While this change does offer substantial improvement in terms of reducing emissions by up to 60 percent, activists are concerned that this has essentially disincentivized the state from cracking down on the kilns. When they were burning bricks the old-fashioned way, it was a hazard to everyone—now, it’s easier to turn a blind eye.

The contrast between environmental enforcement and labor enforcement for lower-class workers exposes the true dynamics at play. When smog from traditional kilns has negative impacts on Pakistan’s urban elites—closing schools in Lahore, grounding flights, creating public health crises for the society writ large—the state suddenly found the resources and motivation to mobilize: mandatory technology upgrades, providing loans for conversions, conducting inspections to ensure compliance. Yet that same state apparatus remains seemingly absent when the victims are bonded laborers whose suffering is largely out of sight and out of mind.

The unity that kiln owners have achieved in defending their interests stems directly from their integration into the country’s political class. A 2009 investigative report documents what labor activists have known for decades—that influential politicians and their relatives are well connected with the kiln owners, and in many cases actually own kilns themselves.

Fifteen years later in 2024, little had changed when a report from the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Pakistani Minorities noted that “too many kiln owners are power brokers and some even hold political office,” which helps explain why laws remain unimplemented. This transforms what should be straightforward law enforcement into a system where the criminals write and enforce the laws, where police who should raid kilns instead collect bribes to ignore violations, where the district officials tasked with freeing bonded laborers are themselves connected to the families profiting from bondage.

This integration manifests operationally through the Brick Kilns Owners’ Association of Pakistan, formally recognized by the government as a trade organization in 2021. The infrastructure of impunity operates through well-documented channels: police corruption that allows violations to continue unchecked, political connections between owners and local officials that shield operators from prosecution, and the systematic failure of enforcement mechanisms despite comprehensive laws that exist on paper.

Given this political protection, the legal framework’s failure to end the bondage system becomes less mysterious. Pakistan officially abolished bonded labor in 1992 through the Bonded Labor System Abolition Act, and Punjab province has since declared child labor in kilns to be illegal. Islamabad even ratified international conventions against forced labor—creating a legal framework that should have ended this system over three decades ago. The law mandated District Vigilance Committees in each district to identify and free bonded laborers, empowers magistrates to cancel debts, and even to punish offenders.

There are even provisions to help freed families rebuild their lives. On paper, the tools are there.

And that’s largely where they remain—tucked away in a government filing cabinet, worth little more than the paper that they’re printed on. Most of Punjab’s 41 district committees never inspect kilns and never take action against the owners. When international pressure demands visible actions—and that has occurred from the US and EU on a few occasions—the response is usually the same: training, task force assemblies, and a couple show raids that free a few dozen workers for international observers before operations resume unchanged.

This transcends corruption in the traditional sense—it represents the complete fusion of economic exploitation and state power, where enforcing laws against bonded labor would require those in charge to prosecute themselves and dismantle the machine that finances their elite status. The debt slavery that begins with peshgi advances can never be escaped when the political system protects the creditors and the legal system provides cover for both. Understanding this helps explain why millions remain trapped here—and why the next generation of Pakistanis inherit not just their parents’ debts but their parents’ jobs.

Life at the Kilns

The brick-making process itself transforms human beings into components of an industrial machine, each stage of production demanding contributions from every family member regardless of age or physical capability. The work begins before sunrise when families arrive at the clay pit, where men dig the raw material out of the ground while women and children begin the mixing process, treading through wet clay for hours to achieve the right consistency. Once mixed, the clay moves to the molding area where families work as units in a repetitive motion that defines their entire day: pack the clay into wooden molds, scrape off the excess, flip the mold to release the brick, stack it to dry, and repeat—a thousand times between sunrise and sunset to meet the daily quota that determines whether they can eat.

The formed bricks must then be turned and moved multiple times over several days as they dry, exposed to sun that can push temperatures well above 40 degrees Celsius in the summer, the heat reflecting off clay surfaces, creating an environment that keeps workers constantly on the edge of heat stroke.

When the bricks are ready for firing, men and teenage boys load them into kilns that burn coal at temperatures between 1,000 and 1,200 degrees Celsius for 24 to 48 hours, creating furnaces that require constant attention to maintain such enormous heat. After firing, these same workers unload the finished bricks while they’re still hot enough to blister skin—letting them cool all the way would simply take too much time. They’re stacked for transport to construction sites across Pakistan.

The physical environment of the kilns creates hazards that manifest as lifelong disabilities for those who survive long enough to develop them. We’re not being dramatic when we say that—this is not a career for the faint of heart, and accidents are all too common. The health impacts accumulate into an entire catalog of otherwise preventable suffering as the human body begins to break down under labor that it was never designed to sustain.

The most initially obvious damage comes from the sheer physical demands of the job: lifting thousands of bricks daily—each weighing approximately three kilos, which add up quickly—causes chronic back and joint pain that becomes universal by middle age. Hernias and spinal injuries are common enough to be unremarkable among workers who carry stacks of eight to ten bricks on their heads and backs repeatedly throughout fourteen-hour days. The constant bending only exacerbates all of this.

And that’s only one side of it. Asthma, chronic bronchitis, tuberculosis, and other forms of lung infections are ubiquitous in this line of work, and nearly everyone exhibits some form of symptoms. Skin problems run rampant where people work in either water or mud for hours every day, developing fungal infections that spread easily through families living in close quarters. For those spared from the water side of things, prolonged exposure to coal and waste fuels causes rashes and inevitable burns that go untreated because medical care requires money these families will never have.

The intense sun exposure during the drying process causes heat stroke regularly in the summer months, and vision problems that compound over years from the reflection off of the clay. Some surveys around the kilns have found that about one in twenty families have children who have lost their eyesight completely.

Women suffer unique health burdens that layer additional suffering onto the baseline degradation that all kiln workers experience. This work is brutal enough for someone in peak physical fitness—but working through pregnancies is the expectation here, with little to no prenatal care. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rate of miscarriages is astronomical here.

The living conditions that workers return to after their twelve-plus hour day offer little comfort. Most kiln workers live in structures that are often made of either mud or rejected bricks from their work, typically only one or two rooms where nearly three quarters of workers sleep and cook in the same space, often with little to no electricity. These shelters frequently “feature” leaky roofs that provide minimal protection from winter cold or summer heat, with temperatures ranging well outside what people are supposed to live in throughout the year.

The density of these living arrangements transforms basic sanitation deficits into genuine danger. Roughly 80 percent of kiln workers in surveyed sites lack running water at home entirely; without water infrastructure, most also lack toilets, forcing families to relieve themselves in open areas around their shelters and relying instead on hand pumps that draw from groundwater or nearby sources in settlements where inadequate sanitation creates high contamination risk, the unsafe water cycling waterborne diseases through communities already weakened by malnutrition and exhaustion.

When illness or injury inevitably strikes these workers weakened by constant exposure to hazards, medical care remains functionally out of reach. Since they’re not registered employees, workers have no health insurance—the vast majority lack any coverage at all. The kiln owner may at best provide a small loan for medicine or send them to a cheap doctor, adding the medical costs to their debt burden. More often though, workers simply continue laboring through illnesses, using traditional remedies or no treatment at all, because seeking proper medical care means both the cost of treatment as well as the loss of income from missed work—expenses that families living on the edge like this simply cannot afford.

Amna Bhatti is another case study, having lived this experience for fifty years—she started making bricks when she was ten, and still making them at sixty for 350 rupees a day to service a debt that will outlive her. She’s now paying off a different debt entirely, but it functions the same way—she had paid off portions of her original loan over the decades, only to take new advances when crises struck, when illness demanded medicine or funerals required payments, each loan resetting the clock. Half a century of shaping mud over 12-hour stretches, day in and day out, with little to show for it. She expects to die in this kiln, and if her children remain here, they’ll inherit what she couldn’t pay, passing the debt like a family curse to the next generation.

This baseline of suffering represents what all kiln workers endure regardless of age, gender, or background. But within this universally harsh system, certain groups face additional layers of exploitation that transform this system into something even more brutal, where the vulnerabilities of childhood, religious minority status, and womanhood become opportunities for owners to extract labor, dignity, safety, and hope itself in measures that exceed even the baseline cruelty.

The Vulnerable

Qaiser Dad wakes before sunrise, as he has every morning for the last year, his eleven-year-old body already knowing the weight of the day ahead. The wooden trolley he’ll use to collect mud mixture sits where he left it the night before, and by the time the sun crests the horizon, he’ll already be knee-deep in clay, mixing it with his bare feet alongside the dozens of other children his age who used to dream of something more than extensions of the machinery that turns earth into bricks.

“I liked waking up early for school, but not for this,” he told Al Jazeera, pointing to his trolley that has replaced a backpack as his constant companion since his father fell ill and the family’s survival fell onto his narrow shoulders. His dream of becoming a doctor—a dream that once seemed possible when he sat in a classroom learning to read—has been replaced by this, a routine so exhausting that by eight in the evening when his work finally draws to a close, he can barely summon the energy to eat before collapsing into bed. There’s no time left to play with friends or energy for making childhood memories here.

The scale of what’s happening to children like Qaiser across Pakistan is hard to wrap the mind around: between one and two million children are currently working in brick kilns. The fact that the best estimates vary by a million is a story in and of itself—and this is only in the brick kilns. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimates over three million children are engaged in child labor across all industries. The youngest documented workers are five years old, mixing mud with their tiny feet at kilns from Lahore’s Sundar area to Sindh’s Tando Hyder, while seven-year-olds carry heavy stacks of bricks on their heads, their spines already beginning to curve under the load.

The work that these children do follows a brutal hierarchy determined by age and physical capability, a system that treats human development as nothing more than a progression towards greater labor capacity. Children as young as five or six begin by mixing clay with their bare feet, treading through the mud for hours as it clings to their skin. They fetch water in containers nearly as large as themselves, turn bricks in the sun to ensure even drying, and learn through repetition and exhaustion that this process will come to define their lives—all because of a debt contract “signed” before they were even born.

The digging and mixing of clay, often performed by the youngest children who tread the mud with their feet for hours, leaves their skin cracked and infected, the minerals in the clay eating away at flesh that hasn’t had time to toughen. Once enough has been gathered, they help their parents and other relatives with the molding process that involves flipping and moving thousands of bricks under the sun for days as they dry.

Yet childhood represents only one dimension of vulnerability that kiln owners have learned to exploit. In Punjab’s kilns, another pattern reveals itself through the staggering overrepresentation of religious minorities—Christians comprise less than 2 percent of Punjab’s population, and an even smaller share of Pakistan’s population overall. Yet they form somewhere an estimated 60 percent of the kiln workforce.

Most of Punjab’s Christians descend from Dalit communities who converted to Christianity in the late nineteenth century hoping to escape caste stigma, only to find that Pakistan largely rebranded their exclusion rather than ending it. Government job advertisements until recently explicitly reserved sanitation positions for “non-Muslims,” which overwhelmingly in this area means Christians and Hindus would be funneled into work nobody else wants.

The mechanics of how this translates into kiln slavery are straightforward enough once you understand that Christians in Punjab are systematically land-poor, concentrated in informal settlements around Lahore, Faisalabad, Kasur, and Sheikhupura—the same cities where kilns have colonized the periphery—and locked into jobs that pay too little to ever accumulate property or savings. When crisis strikes, they often have little more than the shirts on their back.

This industry has existed long enough that many people know these contracts are a one-way deal: once you sign up, you don’t come back from them. Nobody happily goes to these owners for a loan—it’s only out of sheer desperation. The kiln owners recruit through these marginalized communities that sit literally adjacent to the kiln sites, ensuring that the religious composition reproduces itself without owners ever needing to explicitly target them—though they frequently admit they prefer minority workers precisely because marginalized people make complaints less often and organize resistance less effectively.

The vulnerability of these minority workers reached its horrific apex in 2014 when Shama and Shahzad, a Christian bonded couple at a Punjab kiln, were falsely accused of blasphemy and murdered by a mob—who threw them inside the kiln alive and watched them burn to death. They had reportedly wanted to leave the kiln after clearing their debt, but the owner allegedly instigated the mob using blasphemy rumors to prevent them from departing without paying an inflated debt. While some arrests were later made, the message to other Christian workers was unmistakable: even when you’ve fulfilled your obligations, even when you’ve paid what you owe, the combination of religious vulnerability and owner control can turn the threat of freedom into a death sentence.

In Sindh province, the pattern repeats with Hindu workers, particularly those from the so-called “untouchable” communities who’ve performed labor like this since before Pakistan’s independence. Districts like Umerkot, Tharparkar, and Sanghar—which hold Sindh’s largest Hindu populations—supply steady streams of families to the kilns, rooted in generations of landlessness and generational poverty that funnels countless into the same traps as the Christians.

Comprising a similarly tiny percentage of Pakistan’s population—clocking in at under 2 percent—Hindus remain politically invisible, their suffering documented in reports yet ignored widely by enforcement mechanisms.

Yet the pattern of preying on the vulnerable extends beyond religious minorities to include other groups with little protection: Afghan refugees who’ve worked in the country’s kilns for decades, thousands of families who fled war—some dating back to the original Soviet invasion—only to find themselves trapped in another hellscape. A 2006 survey documented thousands of Afghan brick kiln workers in Punjab province alone, often involving their children as well. Despite being born in Pakistan and never having seen Afghanistan, they lack Pakistani citizenship and are essentially stuck in a legal limbo that kiln owners understand how to exploit.

What happened earlier this year exposes something fundamental about what Pakistan’s government chooses to enforce and what it chooses to ignore. Starting in April, authorities launched mass deportations of Afghans, with Lahore police leading the charge and going door-to-door. Reports vary in terms of the total number of those deported, but it is almost certainly in the tens of thousands—many of whom were kiln workers.

This shows conclusively that when properly motivated, the government can mobilize police to track down and carry out raids against such operations. Let it not be forgotten that despite its fledgling economy, this is a nuclear-armed country—they are not helpless to enforce their laws. Immigration violations are receiving increasing crackdowns, but labor violations that trap millions of Pakistani citizens are placed on a back-burner, so to speak.

Conclusion

Amna Bhatti, sixty years old and still making bricks after fifty years for 350 rupees per day, expects to die servicing a debt that will outlive her. “We are poor, and we will always stay poor,” she says. “When you enter this road, the only way out is death.”

The cruelest twist to all of this is that the system that traps Amna and so many others has officially been illegal for over thirty years. Pakistan abolished bonded labor in 1992, banned child labor in kilns, and ratified international conventions against forced labor—yet the laws exist primarily as documents filed away in government offices that kiln owners never read and police never enforce. The reason is simple: the people who profit from bondage are the same people tasked with ending it, creating a system where enforcement would require the powerful to prosecute themselves.

What does it mean that in 2025, in a nuclear-armed nation with aspiration to regional leadership, that well over a million people can be bought and worked to death for the price of a medical emergency, their children inheriting debts left over?

The resistance exists—labor rights organizations have freed tens of thousands through decades of dangerous work, court petitions occasionally succeed, international pressure even sporadically produces action—yet 3.5 million people remain trapped in hereditary slavery in a world where people routinely ask how historical slavery was ever allowed to happen, how entire societies could have tolerated such barbarity, and why more people didn’t stand up to it.

The answer, of course, is that most people never owned slaves themselves—many may have even found the institution distasteful—but they allowed it to continue because speaking up required sacrifice while looking away cost nothing, because it’s remarkably easy to benefit from others’ suffering when it happens out of sight.

Right now, millions of people are making bricks across thousands of kilns on the edges of Pakistan’s major cities, and precious few are paying attention—both domestically and internationally. Not because the information is hidden—these kilns operate in plain sight, their chimneys visible across the skyline, and they have been widely reported on in international media.

History will ask how this was allowed to continue when everyone knew it was happening, and the answer will be the same as it’s always been: because looking away was easier.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many people are estimated to be trapped in debt bondage in Pakistan’s brick kilns?

Over an estimated 3.2 million people are enslaved in debt bondage in Pakistan’s brick kilns.

What is the ‘peshgi’ system?

The ‘peshgi’ system is a debt bondage system where families receive an advance payment (peshgi) in exchange for labor, trapping them in a cycle of debt that is nearly impossible to escape.

How do families end up in debt bondage in Pakistan’s brick kilns?

Families often end up in debt bondage after taking emergency loans to cover expenses like medical bills. They sign contracts with thumbprints, agreeing to work off the debt, but the terms make escape mathematically impossible.

What are the living conditions like for workers in Pakistan’s brick kilns?

Workers in Pakistan’s brick kilns live in structures made of mud or rejected bricks, often with one or two rooms where they sleep and cook. These shelters frequently have leaky roofs and lack running water and toilets, leading to high contamination risk and waterborne diseases.

What health issues do workers in Pakistan’s brick kilns face?

Workers face a range of health issues including chronic back and joint pain, hernias, spinal injuries, asthma, chronic bronchitis, tuberculosis, skin problems, heat stroke, and vision problems. Women also suffer from high rates of miscarriages due to working through pregnancies.

How does the political system in Pakistan protect the brick kiln owners?

The political system in Pakistan protects brick kiln owners through police corruption, political connections between owners and local officials, and the systematic failure of enforcement mechanisms. Many kiln owners are influential politicians or have relatives in politics.

What is the role of religious minorities in Pakistan’s brick kiln industry?

Religious minorities, particularly Christians and Hindus, are overrepresented in Pakistan’s brick kiln workforce. They often come from land-poor communities and are targeted by kiln owners due to their vulnerability and lack of political protection.

How does the government’s enforcement of environmental regulations compare to its enforcement of labor laws?

The government enforces environmental regulations more strictly, as seen in the mandatory technology upgrades for kilns to combat smog. However, labor laws are largely ignored, with little to no enforcement against bonded labor practices.

What is the impact of the seasonal nature of the brick kiln work on workers?

The seasonal nature of the work makes it even harder to escape from debt bondage. During the monsoons, kilns shut down for weeks, leaving workers with no income and forcing them to borrow more from the kiln owner just to survive.

How does the debt bondage system affect children in Pakistan’s brick kilns?

Children as young as five years old work in the kilns, inheriting debts their parents signed before they were born. They face harsh working conditions, health issues, and are often trapped in a cycle of debt that they cannot escape.

Sources

• Original Places video: Pakistan’s Brick Kilns: Millions Trapped in Slavery
• Hero image source by Ktownboy103 / openverse, cc0.