Tea workers lose children to traffickers

One in every five missing children in India is from West Bengal

Fagua Ooraon was running late for work when traffickers stopped outside his hut and said they were taking his teenage daughter with them to the city for better employment.

Ooraon said ‘no’ and went to work. When he got home that evening, his daughter was gone.

“They took her anyway,” he said, sitting in his home in Diana Tea Estate in the East Indian state of West Bengal.

“If I wasn’t late that morning, I would have stayed and talked my daughter out of it. But they had lured her with the promise of good clothes, a new mobile, better education and money — everything I have been struggling to give my family since the tea gardens started closing.”

Tea gardens began shutting in 2002 and within five years, most had fully closed because management said they were unviable to run or struggled with big loans.

Sabita, 16, is among the growing number of adolescent girls coerced to leave the tea-growing belt of West Bengal, whose pickers endure severe poverty, social isolation and health problems now their jobs have gone.

West Bengal reported 14,671 cases of missing children in 2014, according to Child Rights and You, a non-profit organisation that analysed government data. One in every five missing children in India is from West Bengal, it stated.

“There is a close missing children to linkage of organised crime,” said Atindra Nath Das of Child Rights And You.

“Large number of missing children are actually trafficked, kidnapped or abducted.” In the 276 mostly closed tea gardens of West Bengal, young girls are dropping out of high school and “disappearing” with agents, according to a Child Welfare Board official, who did not want to be identified.

“Parents are helpless and in many cases don’t even file a missing person’s report in the hope that their daughter will safely return home,” said Victor Basu of Dooars Jagron, a non-profit group fighting for child rights.