“The only thing that scares me is the jumbo train,” she says. The jumbo train is an ancient wagon that brings bodies into the city from outlying districts to be burnt. It arrives at night.

Selma came to Calcutta three years ago with her mother. Her mother went home, but Selma stayed. “I sleep on Platform 1,” she says. “I make some money from the eunuchs by dancing and clapping for them.”

The eunuchs perform for pennies at the station and pose little threat to Selma. But others do. Calcutta has a burgeoning business in child trafficking. Gangs travel to the poorest areas of India offering jobs or marriage to young girls to lure them to the big city. Inevitably they end up in the red-light districts, plying their trade with lips painted bright red. Many try to look older — some could even pass for 16. These children sell their bodies for as little as five rupees (about 7p) and are brutally abused by the pimps who control them and by the men who often rape them.

Many girls have a familiar tale to tell. Most come from poverty-stricken areas such as the Sunderbans, three hours’ drive from Calcutta. Their parents sell them, in all innocence, to credible-looking men who say that they are looking for a wife or a domestic servant. For about £6, mothers allow their daughters to be taken in the hope that they will get a job and an education and send money home to the family.

The reality is that they disappear into the seedy background of the massively overpopulated streets of Calcutta. Aid agencies battle daily to help the people whom Mother Teresa described as the poorest of the poor, but an increasing demand for young children means that it is difficult to keep up with voracious traffickers.

“We have many projects in and around Calcutta but it is impossible to reach everyone,” says Lisa O’Shea, of Goal, the charity. “Education is the key here. If we can get young kids into schools there is less chance of them falling into the hands of the traffickers and pimps.

“We have built schools in the Sunderbans in an effort to keep the youngsters in the countryside and that seems to be working.” The Sunderbans is an idyllic-looking estuarine system of mangrove trees and rivers. Its name, Bengali for beautiful forest, belies the dark trade that is plied here.

Mamouna ran away when she was 13 in search of a better life, only to be subjected to cruel abuse before she was rescued by police and placed in the care of a charity.

“The people were horrible and beat me. I had no food and was made to sleep outside with the mosquitoes,” she says. Others who run away are not so fortunate.

Girls who are trafficked are moved across India, and sometimes across the border into Bangladesh. No one knows the true extent of the trade but agencies estimate that there are about five million people homeless in Calcutta alone — almost one third of the city’s population.

A massive, sprawling rubbish dump lies on the edge of Calcutta. More than 2,000 attracted by the promise of city jobs call this place home. The huge tip is like Dante’s Inferno on Earth. Foul fumes spew from the muck and everything you touch is covered in a black, oily residue. Overhead crows and hawks circle, waiting to feed on the bodies of animals or people who dare venture inside.

Children hardly old enough to walk patrol the paths through the dump, searching for tidbits that they can sell. They separate paper, plastic and metal into huge piles before carting them off to recycling yards for pennies.

A Goal hostel in Calcutta provides shelter for prostitutes and their children. The working girls are happy that their children are getting an education — albeit that the schools operate in full view of the prostitutes and their customers.

Nina, a prostitute, hopes that her 12-year-old daughter, Hadura, will be able to become a teacher.

“I had no choice,” says Nina. “When I was 13 I was already working in the sex industry. My mother did the same. It’s very common to have this type of family tradition, but I want something different for Hadura.”

LIFE FOR CHILDREN IN INDIA

• About 17 million work, 2 million in hazardous jobs
  
• At least 6 million live in slums
  
  
• About 300,000 — at least — engage in commercial sex
  
  
• About 200 girls and women enter prostitution daily, 80 per cent unwillingly
  
  
• More than 30 million women and children have been victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation in Asia in the past 30 years
  
  
• Under-5 mortality rate: 85 out of every 1,000 births

  Sources: Indian Government and Census; Save the Children India; Unicef

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