The most populous nation on Earth is seeing a building boom. India’s government says the country will be the world’s third-largest construction market by next year, right behind China and the US.
In busy brickyards across northeastern India, workers use naturally occurring clay to make the literal building blocks of 21st-century India.
National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek learned more about this trade five years ago. He was there as part of his multiyear walking journey along the path of early human migration, the Out of Eden Walk.
Salopek spoke to The World’s host, Marco Werman, about exploring India’s northeast — on foot.
Marco Werman: Today, we ask you to look back to 2020 when you walked across India. You wrote then about a man named Deepak Anand. He was tracing the footsteps of Siddhartha Gautama. We know that individual better as the Buddha. Remind us what the Buddha was doing in northeastern India.
Paul Salopek: Well, he was inventing Buddhism, right? Siddartha Gautama was a prince from what is today Nepal. And he rejected all of his wealth, his privilege. When he was growing up, his palace, as a kid, he had 32 nursemaids. So, he was definitely part of that 1%. And he wanted to throw all that aside. He went walking, seeking meaning in life and ended up walking through what is today’s kind of central-eastern India, where he attained enlightenment under a fig tree.
So, Buddhism was born in India, but the majority in India today of people are Hindus with a large Muslim minority. How much of India’s population today are Buddhists?
A very, very, very small portion. I mean, you can walk through the heartland of where the birthplace of Buddhism is today. It’s in the state of Bihar in India.
So, we began this chat with sound from a brickyard. That’s from a video you made of Indian laborers, barefoot women carrying heavy loads of unbaked bricks on their heads. It does not look like pleasant work. How are people compensated in the brickyard?
They’re paid by how many bricks they can heft around on their heads. I mean, these days, there are 200,000 brick kilns in all of India. Many of them are worked by hand, and many of the workers are women.
I mean, it’s stunning. This video is just the scale of this one brickyard. I was curious because there’s been a lot made of the rise out of rural poverty for many in India, especially women, and the manufacturing jobs that have helped them progress. But is this progress for them? How do they see this backbreaking work compared to their lives in the fields and preparing crops for market?
Well, this is considered a — believe it or not — a step up because agricultural labor, you know, stoop labor, and say, rice paddies, is even harder. Women carrying 40 pounds of bricks on their heads, walking kilometers back and forth from these kilns. They say it’s better. The men have all gone to work in the cities, and the women are left behind to do this kind of manual labor. It’s pretty tough.
Your walk also took you along the Brahmaputra River. And about 70 miles upriver from the brickyard, you came upon this really joyous site. So, these kids are sliding down a hill like they’re on a slide at a water park. But this is no water park. What’s going on here?
Yeah, this is just classic India, Marco. I mean, going from tragedy into pure joy in a few footsteps. The Brahmaputra is this big kind of blade of water, you know, glacial melt, rainwater pouring from the Himalayas into the Indian Ocean. And all along it, along this stretch, where high berms of dirt, irrigation kind of ditches, the walls of them. And for kilometer after kilometer, local village kids have made their own mudslides, hauling water up to the top to grease the mud so they can shoot down them. They have their own water park. So, walking through this part of India, India is a young country. I think the last statistics I looked at, there are 300 million Indians who are younger than 14 years old. The landscape, when you walk through it, can sound like a gigantic playground. And these kids were making their own fun. Slide after slide after slide into the river.
So, several hundred miles east, the scenes change. You were in the tropical foothills of the Himalayas, and you came upon a village where the local industry is all about bamboo. Tell us about the village of Baga Dima.
Baga Dima, what can I say, is like a village of just a few dozen huts up in the mountains, a tropical rainforest. And they were growing lychees and jackfruit. Except I also saw them chopping bamboo and cutting it with band saws in front of their houses and sometimes, hand saws. And I said, “What are you guys doing?” They were making straws, for beverages for city folk. As you remember, back then, there was this big campaign to ban plastic straws globally. And so, Indian entrepreneurs had come up to the hills where bamboo grows naturally. They knew bamboo as a grass. And it’s hollow, right? You can poke a hole through it. And it serves as a sustainable organic straw that, if you wash it, it can be reused 100 times. So, these villages, like Baga Dima, had a bamboo straw boom. When I was walking through, everybody was chopping down bamboo and making straws for city folk, earning about 1 1/2 cents per straw.
Yeah. So, when I go to my local espresso shop, and they put one of those alternative straws, is Baga Dima the main source of these alternative environmentally friendly straws, or at least as part of India?
It’s part of the system, like Baga Dima. They were getting orders of like 1,000 to 10,000 straws. And you know, when you consider half a billion plastic straws made in the US alone … it’s just a tiny, tiny dent, but they’re doing their part for the planet.
One last milestone. You wrote, “Few outsiders travel the hills of India’s northeastern frontier. The region is too remote. Its beauty is without labels.” So, it was here, in what looks like paradise, that you found the village of Azuram. It had declared itself an ecological zone. What does that look like? And what did it take for the village to make this declaration?
It’s way up in the foothills of the Himalayas, kind of near Burma. So, they’d set aside half their lands. Imagine a little village, I think about 45 houses, taking this kind of forward-looking decision. It’s a radical decision when your belly depends on the land. Agriculture … to kind of set it aside as a communal preserve. And they were noting that the forest elephants were gone, but deer and other animals were still there. And they were proud to tell me that the tiger was starting to come back as well. They told me this after I’d walked into the village at night through the rainforest. Thank heavens, because I’m not sure I would have walked in there at night knowing tigers are prowling around. But is it going to work? I don’t know. I mean, it’s so remote, and I would find it kind of hard to think that foreign birdwatchers would be arriving at Azuram anytime soon. But the sheer will and the forward-thinking is almost heartbreakingly encouraging. As tough as the obstacles are to make it viable. Amazing people.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove references to stupas, which were misidentified as Buddhist temples. A stupa is better defined as a sepulchral monument — a place of burial or a receptacle for religious objects.
Parts of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.
Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk and also at @InsideNatGeo.
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