Chennai: Chasing birds in Jawadhu Hills Forest on August afternoon, 13-year-old Sakshi and his friends TirumuThy and Prabhu were approached by a middle-aged man who offered them clothes, money and cellphones.
The man put them all on his motorcycle and drove four more and a half hours to the Siruvachur cotton field in the Screening District.
Children work hard from dawn to dusk, carry out cotton manually, and harvest the product.
Every year during the cotton season (August to January), Malayali tribal children from Kalvarayan, Jawadhu and Hills Vellimalai are traded to work in unforgiving conditions in villages throughout Kalakurichi and Salem.
They arrived at the field around 4am to eliminate their taste from the selected line flower as a woman – a process known as gold.
They then covered the flowers issued with the plastic strip to avoid pollen contamination, collect pollen granules from a series of other flowers from the lines chosen as men, clean them on the flowers released, and let it fertilize.
“If we work from morning to 6pm, we get Rs 300,” said Sakaki Vel, a 15-year-old boy who worked in last year’s field.
“If we rest other than lunch, or if the plants don’t produce enough Bolls, they cut our fees.” Local residents sympathetic to children said the police failed to take action against human traders, although often warned.
“The tribal family faces discrimination and ignores from the police too.
They turned to blame parents because they did not oversee their children but never submitted a case,” said Kahakshmy, a teacher at the Jawadhu hill who took the cause of the tribe.
Tiruvannamalai SP, a Pavan Kumar said the local police had been trained to organize a child worker, and rescue operations were carried out recently as last month.
“We intercept the bus that brought children from Jawadhu Bukit to work in a cotton factory,” he said.
“Local officials are always to take complaints,” Murugan, Director of the Childline District project in Tiruvannamalai, said their records showed 250 children from Jawadhumalai had worked in Siruvachur in recent months.
“The numbers can run into hundreds if we start counting children from other hills that work on all agriculture,” he said.