A burden to carry

This woman is one of a group labouring on a building site that looks like an obstacle course and an accident waiting to happen. There is no protection for construction workers in India unless it's something like a World Bank project that needs to tick all the boxes to be reported on.

Day labourers have no job security. They get paid if there's work, the weather is fine and they are not sick. Their safety and wellbeing is their own worry. Many live in slums, have come from rural areas and get paid well below the indexed daily rate, usually a third.

This woman is compressing her spine on a daily basis as she goes back and forth stacking 9 bricks on her head at a time, countless times every day. She bends down to collect them from the stack piled out on the road to walk back to the bricklayers working inside this construction site. She has to for the most part, keep her head and gaze up to maintain her balance, yet below her lie working materials and bamboo poles strewn about without any care or order, that she can easily trip over and fall to sustain serious injuries. She is barefoot.