My Sixty Plus Nation is Maturing

I sip Cha, take a puff of nicotine and generally look around for some company. Mahadev, the Cha-walla is wiping brows and brewing tea again! How many times does he do this throughout the day? When he gets home what does he ask his wife to bring him instead of a cup of tea?
I wanted to ask him these stupid questions but the line of enquiry appeared pretty personal. Instead I asked, “How much milk does the business consume per day?” Surprise! This 3X3 square feet tea stall uses Twenty Liters of milk per day! That means about hundred Liters of tea! Encouraged, Mahadev shares his woe with me. He used to do better than that (my sense of proportion has gone for a toss now) but he cannot find any child labour to run around for him delivering tea to various shops near-by. Now he has to entirely depend on the customer traffic that turns up at his figurative doorstep.
I have nothing else to do so I probe further. Also, I firmly believe, I will get better attention and better tea if I sympathize with him. I do not deny the aforementioned ‘cheap’ statement but I am curious too.
It seems that these child-labours migrate to Kolkata from the villages of Bihar and this immigrant traffic has been reducing off late. The reason being, most of the parents, however bucolic, have lesser number of children now. This implies, parents like to keep their children close by and educate them instead of turning them away to the harsh life of earning livelihood in a metropolis.
Mahadev has his business concerns but is happy otherwise. He tells me that he is one of the many children his parents had and thus did not get any individual attention or resources to grow-up to be a better man. He had to find his own way and is stuck within his 3X3 stall with his tea brewing paraphernalia for the rest of his life. He is happy that now-a-days children are sent to school and given attention by the parents, something he lacked.
I am consoled somewhere deep within. While the cities are flooded with call-centre and IT blokes posing as the pin-up youth of modern India, the would-have-been child labours of Bihar are hauling up a new sun for me.