Unit 2: Children At Work

(i) The ‘strange’ huts were built from all sorts of things, such as metal sheets, tyres, bricks, wood and plastic.

(ii) In Velu’s village, the houses were made of mud and palm leaves. But he found the huts in the city to be strange because they were made up of different stuff such as metal sheets, tyres, bricks, wood and plastic. They stood crookedly and looked as if they would fall any moment. He had actually visited a slum area for the first time, and he was quite surprised by looking at them and wondered how people lived in them and from where they got such stuff to build their huts.

Jaya and other children like her collected paper, plastic, glass and other similar things. They sold all these things to Jam Bazaar Jaggu, who further sold them to a nearby factory.

Although Velu had run away from his home, he was unhappy to find the work of a rag-picker as he had to dig through garbage bins. He remembered that the only work he had ever done was on the landowner’s farm, weeding and taking cows out to graze. However, he decided to work as a rag-picker in the meantime until he found a better job for himself.