Amar Lal

Of the 160 million children involved in child labor, working in inhumane working conditions, few make it out of the generational cycle to tell their stories, let alone become a lawyer and human rights activist. Amar Lal, among the featured keynote speakers at the Design for Freedom Summit in 2025 in March, comes from the Banjara community. As part of the nomadic tribes, he and his family often had to move to survive, working in stone quarries and along the roadsides, barely making a living.

As Lal explains, in an essay as Material Expert in the Design for Freedom International Guidance & Toolkit, “I know the immeasurable impact on children, their families, and communities. Generations of the same families spend their entire life as labourers from birth until death, always remaining on the outskirts of the society without access to the social protections they need.” 

But a chance meeting in 2001 with Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi would change his life when Satyarthi saw him at a stone quarry in Rajasthan during a shiksha rally or education march. Only six years old at the time, he and his family, including two older brothers, had to “break stones at a quarry to live and to “repay debts to the local loan sharks,” according to a 2021 article in Bar and Bench. 

Satyarthi explained to Lal’s father that if he could get his children an education it could change the course of their lives, according to the article. Reticent at first, his father agreed and sent his sons to a children’s home in Jaipur, where learned to read and write, and perhaps experience play for the first time in their young lives. Lal would eventually enroll in a government school to finish his elementary education. 

With this rare opportunity, Lal would not only go on to change his life, but that of others. He became an advocate for child rights, participating in programs such as the World Congress for Education, Bal Vyapar Virodhi Yatra (Anti Child Trafficking March), and international events such as the World Children’s Prize in Sweden.

In addition, Lal, who became a lawyer, was elected President of the National Bal Panchayat (National Children’s Assembly), where he championed child education and anti-child labour campaigns. He now practices at the Delhi High Court, specializing in child labour and abuse cases while continuing to work as a child rights activist. “I want to make sure that no child is caught in the vicious cycle of forced or child labor and that they are given the opportunity to enjoy a life full of rights and possibilities,” he writes in his bio.

While his own journey to escape a life of hardship was an unlikely outcome, Lal is still hopeful for the many still held in forced and child labour conditions. As he explains in his essay in the International Guidance & Toolkit, “global human rights due diligence legislation, presents an opportunity for the global construction sector to shine a light on these challenges and to work towards the formalisation of the sector, the raising of standards for workers and the elimination of forced and child labour.”