Field work is hard. Our typical day on the field starts at 6 a.m., because often, the village we have to visit for data collection is a 2-3 hours’ drive from the town centre where we stay. Rural India is largely an agrarian society with 70 percent of people living in rural areas and half of our workforce still engaged in agriculture (2011-12). This means that we also have to time our field work in a way that we are able to meet the respondents before they leave to work on the fields. Often this entails checking with the local inhabitants the timing of electricity and water supply, and migration and work patterns before making a field plan.

One of our recent studies involved exploring instances of child labour in Gawan, Jharkhand. Our researchers were deployed to our base at Giridih for this study. Our site was a further 4-hour journey from our base. After a long journey through the dry and dusty roads of Jharkhand, we were nearing our sample villages and we could see from the distance, the ground was shining. The glistening ground was due to the rich mica deposits in the soil. Naturally, one of the main occupations of the region is mica mining.