The boy from Bangladesh

A friend and I were driving in south Bengaluru when it began pouring. On a street where accidents are common, we saw a young child walking cautiously ahead of us. He was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and grey trousers and was carrying a plastic shopping bag. Fearing for his safety, we offered him a ride. Startled, he stepped back from our car. Perhaps he was frightened of strangers. His fear subsided when he saw my female co-passenger. Seemingly happy, he jumped into the backseat of my car. He was so small that I couldn’t see his face in the rear view mirror as I drove.

“How are you?” I asked in Kannada. He had a difficult day working at a factory, he replied in an unusually accented Hindi. Why is a child working in a factory, I wondered. My next question: Where are you from? “Bangladesh,” he said.

I froze. A million questions popped up in my head. What was a child from Bangladesh doing in Bengaluru? Since my co-passenger did not understand Hindi, I reached for my phone. With a sinking feeling, I hit the voice record button and asked him to start over. By the end of the ride, I received his consent to share his voice recording and photo with a child welfare service.

Home truths

On that day in June 2018, Amir was coming back from a plastic toys factory. He spoke about a time when his family in rural Bangladesh was visited by a man. The same man had recruited two of his brothers after promising them high-paying jobs in India. The average monthly household income in rural parts of Bangladesh is 26,163 taka (approx Rs 19,876) and 35 million people in the country live below the poverty line.

Amir’s family had welcomed the man warmly. He was fed and given a place to sleep. The next day, Amir, one of his brothers, and the man left the house before sunrise. His parents had packed their sons a bag each and food packets for all. They thanked the man.

They set off walking, through farms, forests, towns, and then more forests until they reached a van parked by the side of a highway. They walked for days, but how many, Amir wasn’t sure. The two boys stayed in the van for two nights while the man stayed with the van driver in a house nearby. 

Over the next two days, more boys came with another man. Soon it was three men and seven boys who set off in the van to a house. The number of boys in the house grew until it was full and the toilets were clogged. Amir and his brother learnt that they were now in Kolkata. The boys were put on a bus, and then on a train to Bengaluru.

Preying on kids

Rita, who works with an anti-trafficking organisation in Mumbai, would later tell me that it was rare for more than two individuals to be trafficked at the same time. Other activists I spoke to had also dealt with only a handful of cases in which multiple children were trafficked at once.

Did Amir make up the story? There was no way for me to find out, but going by my instincts as a former journalist, I knew he was genuine. From the transportation to the men and the money involved and the food they ate along the way — he gave specific answers to every question, no matter how many times I posed the same question.  

I would later learn how traffickers brainwash the young and vulnerable to keep their plan under wraps. Weighing in on Amir’s account, Anaita, who runs a children’s welfare home in Bengaluru, said, “Many young people tell us about how they consented to being trafficked. On probing, we find that they were tutored to consent. This kind of tutoring happens to us all the time. Our parents tutor us to lie that they are not at home, for instance. Or take the case of paedophiles. They groom their targets to keep secrets only between the two of them.”

However, activist Anand from Patna has seen a group of 80 children being smuggled with the help of an elaborate story, and
with government officials in collusion. Trafficking of children supports sub-economies — from making fake identity cards to supplying school bags and uniforms. The racket thrives on cuts and pay-offs.

Fact file

Bangladesh and India share the fifth longest international border in the world, stretching 4,097 km. A large section is porous, and drives the trafficking of humans, drugs and fake currency. According to the UN Development Fund for Women, about 3 lakh Bangladeshi children have been trafficked to brothels in India over a period of time. Debt, gender inequality, natural disasters and now the Rohingya crisis have made the Bangladeshi population vulnerable.

According to a 2023 report, titled ‘Child Trafficking in India: Insights from Situational Data Analysis and the Need for Tech-driven Intervention Strategies’, Karnataka witnessed an 18-fold increase, jumping from six reported incidents in 2016 to 110 in 2022. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh saw the highest number of child trafficking cases.

The sources of human trafficking are often places stricken by poverty, such as Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal and Bangladesh, and the destinations tend to be cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi, where there is money, according to Aarti, who works with an anti-human trafficking organisation in Guwahati.

“Trafficking can be broadly divided into the trafficking of women and girls, and the trafficking of children,” says P Harishekaran, the IPS officer I spoke to in connection with Amir’s case in 2018. The victims are employed as cheap labour or forced into child sex, beggary and other areas, he adds. Harishekaran was additional commissioner of law and order in Bengaluru in 2015 when the police launched ‘Operation Smile’ to rescue hundreds of children from being forced into beggary. 

By now, I had gathered that trafficking involves multiple people and groups along the chain, the modus operandi is highly structured and guarded because there is lots of money to be made, and so, it is unlikely for one organisation to crack it alone.

The Internet is filled with shocking numbers. The illegal profits obtained from the use of forced labour worldwide amount to 150.2 billion dollars per year. That’s Rs 12 lakh crore and more. A kidney can be sold in the international market for up to 2.5 lakh US dollars (Rs 2 crore). The money made from sexually exploiting a single child for one year equals the price of multiple new cars. In India, hotels and dhabas are the biggest employers of trafficked children, followed by automobile and transport businesses and garment factories. The 2023 report also found instances of children as young as five being engaged in the cosmetic industry.

Since the crime falls under multiple Constitutional acts, Harishekaran says it calls for collaboration among the police department, child welfare committee, and other departments of the government. In Karnataka alone, the operation needs to
be synchronised across multiple cities such as Hubballi, Ballari and Mangaluru for significant success, he explains.

Guilt and hope

Amir, the boy from Bangladesh, was certainly being exploited for child labour. He did not recall at which station in Bengaluru his group was asked to alight, but he did remember the boys being divided and sent to different locations. Neither Amir nor the others saw the kind of money they had been promised. And if he tried to go back home, his brothers would get into trouble, he feared.

Just 10 minutes into the ride, Amir asked us to stop the car. He lived about a kilometre away. I offered to drop him to his destination as the rain hadn’t let up. He refused, saying he and his brother would face trouble if I dropped him where he lived. 

I then asked him if I could take his photograph. I told him that I could delete the voice recording if he wanted me to. I asked him if I could share his photo and voice recording with a child welfare service. He gave his consent on all counts. And he walked away. I added Google pin locations on my phone to record where I had picked him up and left.

The next day, I contacted Anaita from the children’s welfare home. She recommended a child rescue organisation and I also looked up other organisations and passed on the proof I had on me. After I had spoken with multiple people from one of these organisations, a man on a bike turned up at my doorstep a few days later. We spoke for about half an hour. The next day, he arrived in a van with two men. They asked me to repeat the conversation I had had with Amir.

The search began. For about three weeks, they drove between the two pin locations and waited at different points with a print-out of Amir’s photo. They found the toy factory Amir had spoken about but did not find him walking in or out of the factory. They never found Amir.

I spent sleepless nights worrying if Amir had been harmed or smuggled away for taking a lift in my car. According to Anand, citizen reporting in trafficking cases is very low. But I had done the right thing, multiple activists and the police assured me. It made me feel marginally better.

I decided to visit one of the NGOs involved in child rescue and rehabilitation in Bengaluru. Their office had the strangest system of access I have ever known. It had no signboard, and the actual office was at least five buildings away, on a different street from where the entrance stood. The office has now shifted, but to where I don’t know.

Such clandestine practices are not uncommon for NGOs in the field, Ritwick, from one such organisation in Bengaluru, explained. It is meant to ensure the safety of the teams and their families.

Yes, the traffickers are after them. I was speaking to a senior child rescue specialist over a video call when he requested me to excuse him for a few minutes. He muted the video call and got on a phone call. He was looking agitated. Returning to our call, he said his on-ground undercover team had just met someone posing as a government official. That person insisted on getting the names and addresses of every member of the team. When the team asked him what they should do, the specialist had instructed them: “Say a firm ‘no’.”

After three months of doing everything that I could do, I gave up. But five years on, every time I drive past that street in south Bengaluru that is prone to accidents, I still think of Amir. Has he been rescued? The optimist in me wants to believe that I did not endanger his life and that he had got down from my car before being noticed by informers like street vendors. Sometimes, pessimism takes over. But as I look back at the journey, I deeply admire the people and organisations that rise above self-interest and take up collective action as a way of life. After all, inaction is collusion.

Note: The names of many locations and people have been changed to protect identities.

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How to identify vulnerable children

* If a child drops out of school, stays aloof or is less active suddenly, there are chances that he or she is being groomed for trafficking. Such children often come from extremely poor families or regions. 

* If there is no visible bonding between a child and the grownup accompanying him or her, or if they look different from each other genetically or culturally, there are chances the child is being trafficked. Aloofness and injury marks are other red flags.

What citizens can do if they run into a child victim

1. Ask relevant questions. Listen openly. Trust. Talk discreetly so the word about your interaction doesn’t reach the exploiter. 

2. Take a photo with consent, without inviting attention. The photos of a child trafficked for sexual exploitation should never go into the public domain.

3. Record the location where you met the victim, and where the victim was coming from and going to. You can drop a pin location or write down the address. It helps investigators.

4. IPS officer Harishekaran recommends that citizens report the case both to the police and a child welfare organisation. The child welfare organisation will also investigate if the case is genuine and reach out to the police accordingly.

What happens to a rescued child?

Every district has a child welfare committee. This committee assigns the child to a safehouse. 

NGOs that can help

satyarthi.org.in, ijmindia.org, vihaan-wms.org, themovementindia.com

(The author works in the development sector.)