Chasing birds in the forests of Tamil Nadu’s Jawadhu Hills on an August afternoon, 13-year-old Sakthi Kumar and his friends Tirumurthy and Prabhu are approached by a middle-aged man offering them clothes, money and mobile phones. The stranger gets the trio to accompany him on his motorbike and they ride four and a half hours to reach the cotton fields of Siruvachur in the Perambalur district.
The children pay a heavy price for succumbing to the lure of seemingly easy rewards. They are made to toil from dawn to dusk in the fields – from manually pollinating cotton to harvesting the produce.
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