Sakthi Kumar
needs all of four minutes to give a crash course on hybrid cottons. At 12, he's the youngest of six children in a family of Malayali tribals from Jawadhu Hills. And he has an acumen for science that can make an academic’s jaw drop.
But, every night before Sakthi goes to sleep, he runs through his weathered hands and sore feet, and tries hard to forget all that he's learned in the past couple of months, when he worked 13 hours a day on a cotton farm more than 200km from his home in Siruvachur.
These months, the agrarian landscape surrounding the villages in Siruvachur and the
Thalaivasal
block of Salem district looks achingly beautiful. Short spells of rain colour the evening sky with silver linings. But it takes a shrewd eye to spot crowns of little heads punctuating these pastures like chess pieces you never saw coming.
In villages that fall between Kallakuruchi and Salem though, this is no secret. Every year during the cotton season that lasts roughly from August to January, forest-dwelling Malayali tribal children from Kalvarayan, Jawadhu and Vellimalai hills are brought down to manually pollinate cotton and harvest it. They toil away from dawn to dusk for months when they should be in school learning language, poetry and the marvels of science.
This year though, the evening tattle among locals swarming the tea shop at Thalaivasal’s Oonathur village is that the number of children has at least doubled. S Murugan, the district project director of Childline in Tiruvannamalai, says their records show 250 kids from Jawadhumalai alone working in Siruvachur. “The numbers may run into hundreds if we start counting the children working in all the farms,” he says. “At times, they can fill up whole trucks,” says Ramesh, a young graduate living nearby, who has been striving to relieve the children from bondage.
While this has been no secret to villagers living around these farmlands, this year, the evening tattle among locals swarming the tea shop at Thalaivasal’s Oonathur village is that the number of children has at least doubled. “At times, they can fill up whole trucks,” says Ramesh, a young graduate living nearby, who has been striving to relieve the children from bondage.
Sakthi,
Tirumurthy
and Prabhu are students of K
Mahalakshmi
, a teacher at the state-run residential tribal school in the village of Arasaveli in Jawadhu, who for the Malayali tribal families in the region is nothing short of a messiah. For years, the 36-year-old had knocked on their doors every single day, pleading, persuading and reprimanding them, until they agreed to send their kids to school. Her relentless campaign finally bore fruit, as the strength of her school rose from zero - when she joined in 2006 - to 518, as it stands today. But for Mahalakshmi, the years as though regressed in the blink of an eye, when she discovered that at least 200 of her students were missing when the school reopened a couple of months ago. A little enquiry revealed they were working at cotton farms in Siruvachur, Attur and Thalaivasal, and at least 25 of them - like Sakthi - had been taken away without the knowledge of their parents.
When the boys didn’t return home well after sundown, the parents combed through the Jawadhumalai forests looking for them, and reached out to A P Nandakumar, local MLA of Anaikattu panchayat. Hours later, they got a call from Sakthi himself, who informed them from a borrowed phone that he and the boys had gone to work on a cotton farm belonging to a man named R Gunasekar in Siruvachur.
A system that consistently let’s downA social worker in the neighbourhood who doesn’t wish to be named, alleges that involving police has only distressed and pushed away the community further.
“Almost every time I accompany a family to the police station to report a missing child, they first blame the parents for poor upbringing. If that doesn’t intimidate them, they always have kangaroo courts – calling both parties (farmland owner and the tribal family together), and try to settle the case after pocketing a fat sum from each,” she says. “Filing an FIR would mean following up – reporting on the case every day, identifying the children, bringing them home and seeing it all the way through to the court – none of which police is inclined to do,” she says, and adds that they have had equally draining experiences with the district labour department.
Officials say they have been proactive and are taking incidents seriously. They say differences may have initially arisen due to "lack of communication" between tribal families and police officials. Tiruvannamalai SP, A.Pavan Kumar, says that the local police has been trained in identifying child labour and rescue operations have been conducted as recently as last month. "We intercepted a bus that was carrying children from Jawadhu Hills to work in cotton mills," he says. "The local police is ready to lodge cases when they are brought up," he says.
Mahalakshmi says on August 15, she wrote a letter to the district child protection officer (DCPO), appealing for rescue of tribal children trapped in the cotton fields of Kallakuruchi and Salem. “Although it was forwarded to the labour department, no action has been initiated to set the children free,” she says.
Tiruvannamalai district collector B Murugesh and officials from the district child protection unit remained unavailable to take calls from TOI. Salem's district collector S Karmegam, said he was unaware of the situation and would need to check with the local authorities to get clarity on the situation. "There's a possibility kids may have come down to visit extended families after schools shut down, but we don't know if they are working on the fields," he said.
But C Ramu, a child rights activist who between 2010 and 2013, had mobilised young volunteers from the region to identity, document and rescue child labourers as part of an operation with the
Unicef
, says he too has been deadlocked following government inaction and a powerful union of farmers who manage to muscle their way out every time. Activists also allege that children are poached for work from under the nose of village and panchayat heads, who remain unmoved by it.
Meanwhile, says Mahalakshmi, influential landowners and their brokers continue to hunt the hills for young, cheap farmhands. And because most homes in the region are spread out, kids who are home alone are vulnerable. “When they spot kids playing in the forest, they lure them with the promise of money, new clothes, good food and mobile phones. Their noses are trained to smell poverty and desperation; this was especially the case through the last year, when children watched their parents lose jobs and struggle to put together one decent meal,” she says. “For the child, the offer sounds irresistible.”,
S Murugan, the district project director of Childline in Tiruvannamalai understands the underbelly of dearth and discrimination that fuels this system. “There are instances when children are taken away for a whole year. The brokers hand over an advance of Rs500 or Rs1,000 to their families, and assure to send their children back with remunerations starting from Rs30,000, for a year of labour. This, of course, is a sham,” he says.
Sakthi and his friends for instance, were stealthily dropped off at the Tiruvannamalai bus depot after a month of being used for backbreaking work. “The broker handed them each Rs1,000, told them he’s going to the toilet and fled. The kids waited for more than an hour before borrowing a phone from someone to inform their parents that they were stranded in Tiruvannamalai,” says Sakthi’s mother Kozhandaiammal.
When TOI called Gunasekar, he declined to having employed children or even cultivating cotton, but tribal families say they have repeatedly reached out to him to send their children back home.
A gruelling jobCotton is a bisexual flowering plant, having both male (anthers) and female (pistons) reproductive organs. Manual pollination of cotton to derive an improved hybrid begins with the removal of anthers from the flowers of the lines selected as females – a process known as emasculation. Children mostly must wake up as early as 4am, when the flowers have just opened up, to do this.
They then cover the emasculated flowers with a plastic strip to avoid pollen contamination, collect pollen grains from another set of flowers from lines selected as males, dust them over the emasculated flowers, and leave them to fertilize.
“After fertlization, it can take up to a week for the fibre-containing fruit, called boll, to grow, and about 60 days for it to burst open into cotton. And once harvest starts, it can continue up to 20 days, following which, seeds must be collected and sown all over again,” says T M Kumar, cotton expert at
Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.
Unlike paddy, mechanised harvest isn’t possible for cotton, owing to its bushy nature and individual flowers that are unevenly spread out. It can therefore only be harvested by hand. Since it is primarily labour that makes hybrid cotton production expensive, children become easy prey to exploitation.
Just after the lockdown was announced last year, Sakthi Vel, 15, was taken to work on a cotton farm in Siruvachur, in exchange for Rs2,000 that was paid as an advance to his parents. His day began at 3am and ended at 6pm. During the days the sun blazed and the rain poured, kids would continue working with a towel or a thick sheet of paper covering their heads, he says. “Some of them come back with Athlete's foot (a painful fungal skin infection caused due to constant exposure to warm, damp environments),” says Mahalakshmi.
“If we clocked in a full shift from early morning to 6pm, we would get Rs300 a day. But if we took any breaks other than meal times, or if the plants we worked on didn’t produce enough bolls, they would slash our pay,” says Sakthi Vel. The children are often also used for domestic work, feeding the cattle and collecting manure. “Although we work more than what we signed up for, in the end, they come up with a whole page of arbitrary cuts, so we never end up getting the amount we were promised,” he says.
Also, girls and boys are usually put up in temporary huts in the middle of the field. “This definitely creates possibilities for sexual abuse,” says Mahalakshmi. “Since most parents in this tribal community are young adults who never went to school and were married off when they were children, they have no understanding of physical boundaries, sexual safety and hygiene, and consent. Even if young girls come back home pregnant, the families ensure that word never gets out,” she says.
“And my mission is to ensure that the world knows what’s happening to our children. I’ll write a hundred letters if I have to.”
Who are the Malayali tribals?The Malayali tribals come from the Eastern Ghats of northern Tamil Nadu.
They are the largest Scheduled tribes in that region with a population of around 3,58,000 people.
They are usually hill farmers with small lands of their own, on which they cultivate different kinds of millet.
After the pandemic, extreme poverty has pushed them into bonded labour at banyan factories, cotton mills and woodcutting units.
This exposes them to other dangers too; most of the men shot down by the AP police in 2015's red sanders smuggling case were Malayali tribals.
In February this year, Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL) released a rapid survey conducted on 767 vulnerable families (49%-SC; 17%-ST; 23% -MBC), from 24 districts across Tamil Nadu. They found:
Only 20% of the male and 24% of the female population aged over 6 years was literate
Another 42% of the total population above six years had only completed primary and middle school
Diploma and degree holders constituted only about 4% of the total population
Most with school education didn't have demand-driven skills and were forced to take up low paying, unskilled jobs/manual labour
Among the 12-14 age group, 67% of boys and 80% of girls were in school and 21% of boys and 16% of girls were at work
Of all the age groups, 65% of the children were in schools and 25% of them were at work.