Instead of trying out the address in an unknown land, Taccho made it to Sandeshkhali police station and fell at the feet of the officer-in-charge. After several visits and desperate pleas, the OC agreed to make a diary entry and promised to book the youths. However, no police action followed. The youths have meanwhile left following pressure from the villagers.

On the other hand, there are scores of households where children have returned. Many narrate how they were tortured and sexually exploited in brothels and households.

In Malancha Rajbari, a 15-year-old girl managed to return after a year in a Delhi brothel. The teenager used to work at a brick-kiln in Basirhat, about 70 km from Kolkata, before she was lured with the promise of a good marriage.

“Once in Delhi, they put me in a brothel where I was tortured and sexually abused. It continued for about a year before I ran away one morning.”

The walls of the one-room office of Save the Children—an NGO which has started work in the area recently—is cluttered with charts and maps, all pointing to the magnitude of the problem here. One such statistics shows that between April 2004 and June 2006, as many as 540 missing children have returned to their homes in 18 villages.

But figures at the local police station show just a fraction of the problem. Its database reveals that between 2003 and 2006 at least 218 male children have been recorded as missing, of which 14 were traced. The number of missing girls during this period is 455, of whom 29 have returned, says the police. “We are so busy with crimes like murder, rioting and dacoity that we hardly have any time for missing children,” says the duty officer.

... contd.