By Papri Sri Raman
Hyderabad(IANS) : Little Shobha’s story did not make a national headline. Like many children from her village, Deval in Dungarpur district of Rajasthan, Shobha, 12, went to work in a textile factory in Amreli in neighbouring Gujarat.
Her job was to gin cotton. Ginning is a process by which the sticky seed and fibre is separated from the raw cotton pod.
In February this year, Shobha died, a victim of sexual assault. Her sister, also a working child, was ordered by the employer to take Shobha’s body back home.
She was sent home across a state border alone with a dead body, says a report of the Dakshini Rajasthan Mazdoor Union (DRMU).
“Roshan’s hands are inflamed with boils and itches due to pesticides (endosulfan) sprayed on the cotton plants he handles,” says another report.
According to the union, the textile industry in Gujarat is thriving on child labour, mostly of tribal and Muslim children, especially girls, who migrate seasonally from Rajasthan to work in Gujarat’s booming cotton industry.
Rajasthan and Gujarat each have almost 1.4 million children working, according to government data.
In economically progressive Gujarat, “child labour incidence is equal to backward states like Orissa”, the union says.
Based on 2001 census data of child labour in Rajasthan and Gujarat in the age group 9 to 14, it estimates that 200,000 children work in Gujarat’s textile sector.
In another five years, India’s textile sector, currently worth $55 billion, is poised to grow to $110 billion, by when the country hopes to export as much as 7 percent of the world’s cotton textile.
The International Services for Acquisition of Agri-biotech Application has estimated that in India, nearly nine million acres are under genetically modified Bt cotton cultivation.
This year, India exported 5.7 million bales of cotton.
Gujarat hit international headlines for producing 4 million bales out of this, which were exported to China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia, “with China emerging the main buyer of Gujarat cotton”, says Kishore Shah, secretary of the Central Gujarat Cotton Dealers Association.
Central and north Gujarat regions — Ahmedabad district and Saurashtra — are the main cotton growing areas, where Bt cotton yields are 700 kg per hectare.
The main ginning and processing centres are Surat, Vadodara and Kalol, near Ahmedabad.
Researcher D. Venkateswarulu, who has done a series of studies on child labour in Bt cotton, notes: “Most of the cottonseed production is on behalf of companies, including multinationals like Monsanto.
“Almost every 18th child in Gujarat is working or searching for work,” Ashok Khandelwal of the DRMU told the media at a recent workshop in Hyderabad titled “Child Labour and Education”, sponsored by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights.
“The textile sector in Surat alone employs one fourth of the state’s child labour,” Khandelwal maintains.
Children come from Sirohi, Abu, Udaipur, Dungarpur, Banswara in Rajasthan.
“Some are as young as 7 years old”, Khandelwal says.
“Over 100,000 children are taken to north Gujarat from mid-July to mid-October every year — just for one kind of work — cross pollination work (CSP),” DRMU studies say.
“All these children are literally trafficked, moved in the dead of night. Parents often don’t know where their children are being taken by the ‘met’, the village labour coordinator,” Khandelwal says.
Bt cotton is hybrid seedless cotton. A second crop cannot be grown from the first. Farmers have to buy the seeds, especially grown in seed farms.
In seed farms, the male and female plants are grown separately. For getting seeds, the female flowers of cotton have to be pollinated by human hand. Ten workers are needed to pollinate one acre of farm.
For pollination, each female flower bud is opened by hand on day one of the operation.
On day two, the male flower has to be picked by 5 in the morning.
About 200 male flowers are plucked by one child, which then have petals removed and the stamens sun dried.
Then each stamen is physically taken to four-five female flowers and its pollen dusted on them.
The work has to be completed by noon and involves about 12 hours of work for 60 days.
North Gujarat needs nearly 300,000 workers every July-October for pollination work.
“Work environment is hostile.” Children are verbally and physically abused, the DRMU study says, “especially for improper pollination. Girls and boys are made to live together,” often in the open.
“There is no drinking water, they have to also work during illnesses. Many deaths are due to snakebites in the fields… Girls are at an added disadvantage as they often face sexual harassment.”
Often the “Mets” sell the girls, mothers have complained to the DRMU.
(Papri Sri Raman can be contacted at [email protected])