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BBC News
15-03-2025
- General
- BBC News
Tamil Nadu teens capture India's labourers in pictures
The elderly woman gazes wistfully into the distance, her hands curled over a basket of tobacco, surrounded by the hundreds of cigarettes she has spent hours rolling by photograph is one of several snapped by student Rashmitha T in her village in Tamil Nadu, featuring her neighbours who make traditional Indian cigarettes called beedis."No-one knows about their work. Their untold stories need to be told," Rashmitha told the pictures were featured in a recent exhibition about India's labourers titled The Unseen Perspective at the Egmore Museum in the photographs were taken by 40 students from Tamil Nadu's government-run schools, who documented the lives of their own parents or other quarry workers to weavers, welders to tailors, the pictures highlight the diverse, backbreaking work undertaken by the estimated 400 million labourers in India. Many beedi rollers, for instance, are vulnerable to lung damage and tuberculosis due to their dangerous work, said Rashmitha."Their homes reek of tobacco, you cannot stay there long," she said, adding that her neighbours sit outside their homes for hours rolling every 1,000 cigarettes they roll, they only earn 250 rupees ($2.90; £2.20), she told the BBC. In the state's Erode district, Jayaraj S captured a photo of his mother Pazhaniammal at work as a brick maker. She is seen pouring a clay and sand mixture into moulds and shaping bricks by had to wake up at 2am to snap the picture, because his mother begins working in the middle of the night."She has to start early to avoid the afternoon sun," he was only when he embarked on his photography project that he truly realised the hardships she has to endure, he added."My mother frequently complains of headaches, leg pain, hip pain and sometimes faints," he said. In the Madurai district, Gopika Lakshmi M captured her father Muthukrishnan selling goods from an old father has to get a dialysis twice a week after he lost a kidney two years ago."He drives to nearby villages to sell goods despite being on dialysis," Lakshmi says."We don't have the luxury of resting at home."But despite his serious condition, her father "looked like a hero" as he carried on with his gruelling daily routine, said Gopika. Taking pictures with a professional camera was not easy initially, but it got easier after months of training with experts, said the students."I learned how to shoot at night, adjust shutter speed and aperture," said Keerthi, who lives in the Tenkasi her project, Keerthi chose to document the daily life of her mother, Muthulakshmi, who owns a small shop in front of their house."Dad is not well, so mum looks after both the shop and the house," she said. "She wakes up at 4am and works until 11pm."Her photos depict her mother's struggles as she travels long distances via public buses to source goods for her store."I wanted to show through photographs what a woman does to improve her children's lives," she said. Mukesh K spent four days with his father, documenting his work at a quarry."My father stays here and comes home only once a week," he father works from 3am till noon, and after a brief rest, works from 3pm to 7pm. He earns a meagre sum of about 500 rupees a day."There are no beds or mattresses in their room. My father sleeps on empty cardboard boxes in the quarry," he said. "He suffered a sunstroke last year because he was working under the hot sun." The students, aged 13 to 17, are learning various art forms, including photography, as part of an initiative by the Tamil Nadu School education department."The idea is to make students socially responsible," said Muthamizh Kalaivizhi, state lead of Holistic Development programme in Tamil Nadu's government schools and founder of non-government organisation Neelam Foundation."They documented the working people around them. Understanding their lives is the beginning of social change," he BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, X and Facebook.
BBC News
26-01-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Remove violent content seen by Southport killer now, says Reeves
Online platforms must act now to remove violent content viewed by the Southport killer to prevent further attacks, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has told the comments on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg come after the home secretary wrote to X, Meta, TikTok, Google and YouTube saying the ease of access to violent material was unacceptable. The 18-year-old was sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in jail last week for murdering three young girls and attempting to murder 10 other people, including eight leader Kemi Badenoch told the same programme that she believed that a lack of integration into society had played a role in the crimes committed by Rudakubana. The government has announced a public inquiry will take place into the missed opportunities to stop him. Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and six-year-old Bebe King were killed in the attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga workshop during their summer murderer had been known to police, anti-extremism authorities and other public had only been limited intervention and the government has said there were missed opportunities, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer saying the state had of the killer's home uncovered material which suggested an obsession with violence, including the academic study of an al-Qaeda training manual downloaded from the internet. Reeves told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: "It is totally unacceptable the fact that the killer, before he went on to commit those horrific crimes, was able to access - really easily - on some of the online platforms such hateful material," she said."Those companies have got a moral responsibility to take that content down and make it harder for people to access it."Already in some countries around the world including Australia, the companies have taken it down. So they can do that."In the home secretary's letter, co-written with Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that, while possession of the al-Qaeda document was illegal under existing anti-terror laws, Rudakubana had been "able to easily obtain access" to leaving home to carry out the attack, he also watched graphic footage of a knife attack on Australian bishop Mari Emmanuel that had taken place a few months noted the video of the attack had been removed in Australia but could still be accessed in the UK, adding the Southport attack had "laid bare the potential consequences of failing to act on such content". Reeves said the government's online safety bill, which becomes law in March, can order the removal of violent and hateful material."Let's not wait until then - we don't need legislation to stop this from happening. These companies can, and they should, take that material down now," she said her "heart goes out" to the families who lost their daughters, along with the children who "will forever remember the scenes they saw unfold". The chancellor added that lessons needed to be learned on what wrong and why such an "evil man" was not dealt with government also said on Sunday that stricter age checks on the sale of knives online would be introduced. People will have to submit photo ID when they order an item and again when it is delivered, and it will be illegal to leave a package containing a knife on a doorstep if no one is in to collect it. Starmer promised urgent action on the sale of knives to under-18s after the attack, saying it was "shockingly easy" to buy them. Rudakubana had bought the knife used in the attack on Amazon. Badenoch told Laura Kuenssberg that there are "a lot of people" like Rudakubana who "despite being here from childhood or born here, they're not integrating into the rest of society". "They hate their country," she said. "And they are being told that everything about the UK is terrible."He had materials about white genocide."If you are being inculcated in hate, you are not integrating well. And there is so much that we can do across the board. Not just on religious extremism but also just extremism across the board."Pressed by Laura Kuenssberg on what evidence there was that the crimes were linked to integration, as the killer had been born in the UK, Badenoch said it was "one of the elements". She said the evidence was her own experience with a similar background to Rudakubana as an African added that "the effort we make to make people feel a part of the whole is very limited and it shouldn't just be government, it should be the whole of society", with too many groups becoming insular and segregated. She said the incident had affected her "really deeply" as her two daughters also love Taylor Swift. "When it happened, I could just imagine it being them," she said.
