How the young are plucked away to grow cotton

Sakthi Kumar needs all of four minutes to give a crash course on hybrid cotton. At 12, he’s the youngest of six children of a family of Malayali tribals from Jawadhu Hills, Tamil Nadu. And he has an acumen for science that can make any academic’s jaw drop.But, every night before Sakthi goes to sleep, he runs through his weathered hands and sore feet, and tries to forget all that he’s learned in the past couple of months, when he was taken to work 13 hours a day on a cotton farm more than 200km from 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 keen eye to spot crowns of heads punctuating these pastures like chess pieces you never saw coming.While this has been no secret to those living around these farmlands, this year the evening tattle in the local tea shop at Thalaivasal’s Oonathur village is that the number of children has doubled. “At times, they can fill trucks,” says Ramesh, a young graduate living nearby, who has been trying to release the children from bondage. medium87485672Sakthi, 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 day, pleading, persuading and reprimanding, until they agreed to send their kids to school. Her relentless campaign has meant the school now has 518 students. But to her dismay, Mahalakshmi discovered that at least 200 of her students were missing when school reopened a couple of months ago. Inquiries revealed they were working at cotton farms in Siruvachur, Attur and Thalaivasal, and at least 25 of them had been taken away without the knowledge of their parents.When the boys didn’t return home, the parents combed the Jawadhumalai forests and then reached out to A P Nandakumar, MLA of Anaikattu constituency. Hours later, they got a call from Sakthi, 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. medium87486293Failure of systemA social worker, who doesn’t wish to be named, alleges that involving police has only distressed the community.“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 together] — settling the case after pocketing a fat sum from each,” she says. “Filing an FIR would mean identifying the children, bringing them home and seeing it all the way through to the court, none of which police are inclined to do,” she says, and adds that they have had equally frustrating experiences with the district labour department.Officials, however, say they have been proactive. They say the initial issues may have been due to “lack of communication” between tribal families and police.Mahalakshmi says on August 15, she wrote to the district child-protection officer, appealing for rescue of tribal children trapped in the cotton fields of Kallakuruchi and Salem. “Although it was forwarded to the labour department, there has been no word on it for more than two months,” she says. medium87486560Tiruvannamalai district collector B Murugesh and officials from the district child-protection unit remained unavailable to take calls from TOI. Salem’s collector S Karmegam, said he was unaware of 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 says.C Ramu, a child-rights activist who a few years ago mobilised volunteers from the region to identify, document and rescue child labourers as part of an operation with Unicef, says he too has been throttled due to government inaction and a powerful, union of dominant caste farmers who manage to muscle their way out. Activists also allege that children are poached for work from under the nose of village and panchayat heads.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 and mobile phones. Their noses are trained to sense poverty and desperation; especially through the last year, when children watched their parents lose jobs and struggle to put together one decent meal,” she says. medium87486698S Murugan, district project director of Childline in Tiruvannamalai, says there are instances when children are taken away for a year. “The brokers give an advance of ₹500 or ₹1,000 to their families, and promise to send their children back with remunerations starting from ₹30,000 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 brokers handed them each ₹1,000, told them he’s going to the toilet and fled. The kids waited for more than an hour before borrowing a phone to inform their parents that they were stranded in Tiruvannamalai,” says Sakthi’s mother Kozhandaiammal.When TOI called Gunasekar, he denied having employed children or cultivating cotton, but tribal families say they have repeatedly reached out to him to free their kids. medium87486306A gruelling jobCotton is a bisexual flowering plant. Manual pollination of cotton to derive an improved hybrid begins with the removal of anthers from the flowers of the lines selected as females. Children mostly wake up as early as 4am, when the flowers have just opened up, to do this.“After fertilisation, 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. medium87485644Unlike 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 labour that makes hybrid cotton production expensive, children become easy prey.Just after the lockdown was announced last year, Sakthi Vel, 15, was taken to work on a cotton farm in Siruvachur, for an advance of ₹2,000 to his parents. His day began at 3am and ended at 6pm. In rain and shine, the kids would cover their heads with a towel or a thick sheet of paper and continue working, he says. “Some of them came back with Athlete’s foot [a painful fungal skin infection caused by constant exposure to warm, damp environments],” says Mahalakshmi.The children are also used for domestic work, feeding cattle and collecting manure. “Although we work more than what we signed up for, they showed us arbitrary cuts, so we never got 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 creates possibilities for sexual abuse,” says Mahalakshmi. “Since most parents in this tribal community are young adults who were married off when they were children, and never went to school, 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.”Photos: LR Shankar