Brick Making

Tiruvannamalai is experiencing a housing boom and builders, carpenters, labourers, masons, electricians and all the rest have their choice of where and when to work because there is plenty of work available! Most new houses at Tiruvannamalai are built with plastered over bricks - so to support the building industry, local brick making kilns all over the city daily produce a huge amount of bricks.

The workers at these brick kilns are mostly women because the are cheaper to employ (now where have I heard that before)? The ladies in the bottom photograph stopped to have their lunch which they had brought to the site in tiffin tins. Considering how exhausted they must have been from all the heavy labouring they had already undergone that day, they were really friendly and chatty. The ladies get paid piece work at the princely sum of Rs.70 for 1,000 bricks - well someone is definitely making a profit, but I doubt its the cheerful ladies!

In the next photograph a large amount of bricks have been made into a giant kiln which will be set alight (you can see wood stuck into the gaps throughout the pile) thereby baking the bricks.

Once the bricks are baked then the temporary kiln is torn down and the bricks are off on their way to whatever building site has ordered them.

The next few photographs show the process of brick making. With sand and water being combined into a soggy mess and put into individual brick sized molds. The mold is then turned upside down and the wet brick comes out and is left in lines to dry out.

Bricks and more bricks.