Rehana Khatun (name changed), a student of Class X, was sold off to a brothel a few months ago. Rescued by police, the girl recalled to Metro at a village community centre in East Midnapore how she had been duped.

“My father was sick for quite sometime and we had no money. A woman called Lakshmi Haldar who lived near our house promised me a zari worker’s job in Diamond Harbour. My mother did not want me to go but I couldn’t bear to stay here anymore. I went with Lakshmi. We stayed in Diamond Harbour for a day after which they put me and 13 other girls on a train.

“In case anyone questioned us on the train, we were asked to say that our parents were in the next compartment. At one station, police started questioning us. We said as we were told but the cops found none. So they took us to the police station.

“I learnt the place was Pune. An officer told us we had not been brought for jobs, we had been sold off. The police sent us to an ashram. I was so scared. It was eight months before I finally returned home.”

This is just one of the many horror stories from young boys and girls who routinely fall victim to trafficking in cities like Calcutta and its surrounding areas. In June, a doctor couple in Baranagar were sentenced to 10 years for beating their 11-year-old domestic help to death in 2006.

But most cases go unreported, and the culprits unpunished. It’s little wonder that 11-year-old Parbati Doloi of Dhandhalibarh village at Contai in East Midnapore, four hours from Calcutta by road, never got justice. Swapan Panda, the general secretary of NGO Kajla Janakalyan Samity in Contai, said a local agent had taken Parbati to Panipat to work in 2005. After two years, he told her parents that Parbati had died in hospital after suffering an electric shock “while operating a washing machine”.

The Calcutta arm of child rights organisation Save The Children and the Kajla Samity contacted police and demanded her body back. Parbati’s father and two NGO workers went to Panipat, too, but were heckled by goons and forced to cremate the body there. The 11-year-old — 18-year-old, according to the death certificate issued by a Panipat hospital — is believed to have been raped.

“Even a few years back, dalals and recruitment agencies worked openly in these villages. One was called BMC. They gave the youngsters application forms and ID cards and took them to Calcutta. During Durga Puja, the teens would come home wearing good clothes. One even had sunglasses!” said Panda.

The villagers thought their children were doing good jobs. “It was only when social workers dug a little deeper that they realised that BMC stood for Bashon Maja Corporation (Utensil Washing Corporation). The children were all working at roadside stalls and in homes,” he said.

According to Panda, agencies like BMC work clandestinely now because of greater awareness about trafficking. “The agencies usually place ads to scout for householders. Once the deal is struck, the agency demands one year’s wages in advance. So, if the monthly wage is Rs 2,000, the agency gets a lumpsum of Rs 24,000 per worker even before he or she starts work. Of that, the worker’s family receives hardly Rs 500 a month, that too after gaps of six to eight months.”

But the youngsters are not only placed in households. Arpita Panda, a project co-ordinator with Kajla Samity, explained. First, girls and boys are separated. The boys are sent to hotels, roadside stalls, construction sites and quarries. The smaller boys, who have little, nimble fingers, are sent to work in imitation jewellery workshops — many of them in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.

The girls are segregated into three categories:

a) bad looking — permanent domestic workers;

b) average looking — temporary domestic workers;

c) good looking — very temporary domestic workers.

Once the second and third category girls are fed and clothed better and get accustomed to city life, they are sold to brothels or put up in rooms to work as hotel call girls. Some are supplied to highway dens for truck drivers. Another common way of trafficking is through fake marriages.

Members of the Daryapur gram panchayat in East Midnapore said local dalals keep an eye on the most vulnerable families in the villages and lure their young with job promises. Panchayat member Supriti Misra said some are lucky and end up with decent employers. Others come back with horror stories. Some don’t come back at all.

But what happens when a child labourer returns home? Social worker Arpita Panda speaks of child labour schools under the National Child Labour Project (NCLP) that run bridge courses to help these kids catch up. But since awareness is low, many rehabilitated children don’t end up attending these schools. Also, NCLP teachers lack the training required to deal with kids who have been through trauma.

Every school dropout is a childhood lost. So, the next time you see a neighbour employing a kid below 14 at home, or you spot a tot washing utensils at a roadside teastall or come to know of a worker being ill-treated or confined by the employer, never mind if he or she is above the legal working age, speak up. It’s the least you can do.