Plucked away by traffickers, kids toil in Tamil Nadu's cotton fields as ‘pollinators’

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 Perambalur district.