Lankan child slaves for world fashion store

A BBC programme to be aired today exposes how Sri Lankan children at a Tamil Nadu refugee camp were being used to stitch clothes for a huge fashion store in Britain.

Primark has already sacked three of its suppliers last week after an investigation for the BBC's Panorama and The Observer uncovered children labouring in Indian refugee camps to produce some of its cheapest garments.

The investigation found that in the refugee camps of southern India young children had been working long hours in foul conditions to sew the designs that will see, at current growth rates, Primark eclipse Marks and Spencer as Britain's biggest mass-market fashion retailer by 2009, taking £1 of every £10 spent on clothing in the UK.

Other major retailers are scrambling to follow the cheap, fast and fashionable concept for good reason. Worth an estimated £5 bn, the Primark chain now has 4.8 million sq feet of retail space across 177 stores in three countries, employing 25,000 people.

But as this child labour scandal shows, the Irish conglomerate, which sells one in every 10 items of clothing bought in Britain today, had little control over part of its supply chain.

Campaigners are now demanding that the UK government acts to force companies to be responsible for the welfare of workers all the way down their tangled supply chains.

One such child working at the camp is Mantheesh, who works for one of the sacked suppliers. At 11 her life is already an extraordinary story of survival. An orphan, this Tamil refugee had fled the bombings of Sri Lanka only to find herself abandoned by an opportunistic trafficker on a sandbank 10 miles off land.

Exhausted and dehydrated, in the middle of the treacherous Palik Strait, the channel between India and Sri Lanka, she was rescued by fishermen just as the tide was closing over her.

Mantheesh ended up at India's Mandapam transit camp, a fenced-off series of dilapidated, one-storey cement blocks, 12 miles from the flat Arichalmunai beachfront, the first port of call for Sri Lankan refugees brought in by smugglers.

She traced the path of thousands of her fellow refugees, moving north to the camps of the major textile industry region of Tamil Nadu where menial jobs are available to those desperate enough to take them. Mantheesh went to Bhavanisagar camp, 60km from Tirapur.

Within months she was absorbed into India's burgeoning economy, hand sewing from dawn to dusk for a businessman who had shrewdly recruited hundreds of refugees on the cheap to make garments destined for half a dozen European firms, including Primark.

Mantheesh's home, the Bhavanasagar refugee camp, was at the very bottom. The Primark supplier in question, a major Indian exporter called Fab n Fabric, had employed a subcontractor who had discovered the ultimate disposable workforce: child refugees.In northern Sri Lanka, where the war continues between separatist Tamils and the Sri Lankan government, the decision to leave is increasingly an economic one. 'The cost of being smuggled to India is the equivalent of £80,' said Meenakshi Ganguly of Human Rights Watch.

'The trip often requires families to sell property or their wedding gold. They travel by illegal boats and most hope to head north to find work. They are caught between a rock and a hard place.'

About 76,000 Sri Lankan refugees live in poverty in 102 camps across Tamil Nadu. Several hundred thousands more have been absorbed into India's black economy. The state government provides a relief package to those in camps - the head of a family gets 200 Indian rupees, around £3, a month, with smaller payments for additional family members.

Police and state intelligence officers are stationed at the gates of many of the camps. One government official told The Observer the police protect the refugees, but Tamils believe their guards are more concerned with controlling and monitoring their movements.

In Bhavanasagar, many of the children hand-sewing Primark garments had been born in the camp. Others, orphaned or detached from families by war, were more recent arrivals. Home for most are crude huts, amalgams of straw and broken pieces of corrugated iron. The shop offers cheap cigarettes, sold in singles, and dry biscuits.

A Primark spokesman told The Observer that the firm is appointing an agency 'as a partner to act as its eyes and ears on the ground' and is establishing a charitable foundation for children. He said: 'Primark is an ethical organisation and takes its responsibilities seriously, and it is an absolute outrage for anyone to suggest otherwise.

The BBC came to us with very serious allegations about the conduct of a small number of factories that sell to Primark which we investigated immediately and very thoroughly. What we found left us with no option but to drop those factories - no right-minded person would have done anything different.