The dramatic escape of two girls from a mill in Vedasandur in Dindigul district on Sunday puts the spotlight once again on several adolescent girls from poor families being forced into employment in the confines of private spinning mills.
The latest episode also brought to light that nearly 180 spinning mills functioning in the district are now adopting new scheme to lure girls with a promise of higher education instead of the “Sumangali” scheme under which they were provided money for marriage after three years of hard work.
Dindigul Collector T N Hariharan told this newspaper that he has constituted a special committee comprising officials from inspector of factories, labour department, national child labour project and members of NGOs to conduct inspections in all the spinning and textile mills in the district. “Further action will be taken after the commit submits its report,” he said. Unable to withstand the harassment in the mill, R. Pavithra (17) of Chennai and S. Ranjitha (18) of Kadambankudi village in Kumbakonam had risked their lives to escape from the mill by jumping from the 12-foot-high compound wall in the early hours of Sunday.
Pavithra, who fell flat on the ground, broke her left leg, while Ranjitha, who landed in a sewage ditch, escaped with minor injuries.
Both crawled to the main road and waited for nearly three hours in the dark seeking help from passersby. Locals admitted them at Dindigul Government Hospital for treatment.
The two had passed their Class 12 exam recently, but they couldn’t pursue higher education due to poverty. Having learnt about their family situation, a woman broker had lured the girls to the mill with a false promise to help them in their studies, sources said. Life became a nightmare for them.
The mill management took possession of their school certificates to ensure they wouldn’t leave. And the supervisor of the mill forced the girls to work for more than 12 hours a day besides depriving them of proper food and accommodation, said K.R. Ganeshan, state secretary of CITU.
Stating many girls were facing similar hardship inside the mill, the victims appealed to the police who came to conduct inquiry, to rescue the other girls at the earliest. “In the last two years alone, we came across nearly 100 such girl students who were cheated by mills’ agents on the same ground,” said P. Melwyn, state coordinator of Tirupur People’s Forum, which is campaigning against “Sumangali” scheme or “Camp Coolie” scheme in the textile mills.
Earlier, the agents used to recruit adolescent girls under the “Sumangali” scheme from backward districts like Dindigul, Virudhunagar, Pudukottai, Villupuram, Tirunelveli, Thoothukudi, Erode, Ariyalur and Perambalur. However, they stopped this approach after the mills received wide criticism from civil society members and from their foreigner buyers, Melwyn pointed out.
Unlike in the past, the adolescent girls now want to pursue higher education to assist their families. “Hence the agents developed a new approach to lure them to work with a promise of a daily wage of Rs 200 each and financial assistance to pursue their higher education through distance education mode,” he said.
When these girls learned they got cheated after joining work, some among them also attempted to commit suicide because they were unable to withstand the torture, claims Ganeshan adding that they have come across a few such cases in Dindigul. Right activists are hopeful that the committee constituted by the collector would find a lasting solution for this problem.
