Chasing birds in the forests of Tamil Nadu’s Jawadhu Hills on an August afternoon, 13-year-old
Sakthi Kumar
and his friends
Tirumurthy
and
Prabhu are approached by a middle-aged man offering them clothes, money and mobile phones. The stranger gets the trio to accompany him on his motorbike and they ride four-and-a-half-hours to reach the cotton fields of Siruvachur in Perambalur district.
The children pay a heavy price for succumbing to the lure of seemingly easy rewards. They are made to toil from dawn to dusk in the fields – from manually pollinating cotton to harvesting the produce.
Every year, during the cotton season from August to January, Malayali tribal children from the Kalvarayan, Jawadhu and Vellimalai hills are trafficked to work in unforgiving conditions in villages spread across Kallakuruchi and Salem. They get to the fields around 4am to remove anthers from the flowers growing in rows identified as females. The child labourers cover the emasculated flowers with a plastic strip to avoid pollen contamination, collect pollen grain from another set of flowers in lines selected as males, dust them over the emasculated flowers and leave them to fertilise. “If we work from early morning till 6pm, we get Rs 300,” said
Sakthi Vel
, a 15-year-old tribal boy who worked there last year. “If we take breaks other than for lunch, or if the plants don’t produce enough bolls, they cut our pay.”
Sakthi, Tirumurthy and Prabhu are students of K Mahalakshmi, who teaches at the state-run school at Arasaveli. For years, the 36-year-old has been knocking on village doors, alternatively pleading with and reprimanding parents until they agree to send their kids to school. When the school reopened following the long pandemic-induced break, at least 200 students didn’t turn up. It transpired that they were working in the cotton farms of Siruvachur, Attur and Thalaivasal. At least 25 of them, including Sakthi, had been lured away without their parents’ knowledge.
When the boys didn’t return home, the parents combed the Jawadhumalai forests and then reached out to A P Nandakumar, MLA of Anaikattu. Hours later, they got a call from Sakthi, who informed them from a borrowed phone that he and the boys were working in a cotton farm owned by one R Gunasekar in Siruvachur. When TOI contacted Gunasekar, he denied cultivating cotton, let alone employing kids.S Murugan, the district project director of Childline in
Tiruvannamalai, said 250 children from Jawadhumalai had been working in Siruvachur in recent months. “The numbers may run into hundreds if we start counting kids from other parts.”
Tiruvannamalai SP A Pavan Kumar claimed rescue operations were conducted as recently as last month. “We intercepted a bus carrying children from Jawadhu Hills. Local officials are always ready to take complaints.” Mahalakshmi said influential landowners and their brokers continue to scour the hills for child farmhands. “Their noses are trained to sense poverty and desperation.”
The police allegedly fail to take action against the traffickers despite being alerted frequently. Childline’s Murugan said there were instances of children being trafficked for a year. “The brokers pay an advance of Rs 500 or Rs 1,000 to the kids’ families and promise to send them back with upwards of Rs 30,000 for a year of labour. This is, of course, a sham.”
Sakthi and his friends were stealthily dropped off at the Tiruvannamalai bus depot after a month of being used for backbreaking work.