Bunty Mukherjee, the Childline worker racing to stop child marriages
In June 2020, as cyclone and lockdown hit the Sundarbans, Childline worker Bunty Mukherjee went from one child marriage to the next to stop them.
Childline worker · Canning, South 24 Parganas
One Saturday morning in June 2020, a reporter from The Telegraph phoned Bunty Mukherjee to ask about a child marriage that had just been stopped in Basanti, a block in the Sundarbans. He could not stay on the line. “Sorry, I’m racing to stop another child marriage in Jharkhali,” he said, the paper reported. A couple of hours later he called back. That one had been stopped too.
Mukherjee was then a member of the Childline India Foundation in the Canning subdivision of South 24 Parganas, the arm of the national child helpline, 1098, that answered calls about children at risk across these river islands.
What Bunty does
The work is simple to describe and hard to do: when a tip comes in that a girl under 18 is about to be married, get there before the wedding. In the case he was handling that day, an 18-year-old from Canning had befriended a 17-year-old girl in Barasat, more than 70 km away, Mukherjee told The Telegraph.
The timing made the job harder. Cyclone Amphan had hit the coast on 20 May 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown. Families who earned their living as daily labourers had lost both work and homes. Child rights workers told the paper they feared that parents with nothing left would marry off daughters to men who asked for no dowry, and that traffickers were looking for exactly those girls. For every child marriage that was stopped, activists estimated, at least two went undetected.
Who it helps
The people helped are girls whose names are rightly never published. In one case from the same weeks, reported by IPB News, a girl in Basanti was due to be married to a man who had allegedly offered her father, a labourer out of work, ₹50,000. Her friends, members of a village child protection committee, alerted the police. Officers and Childline volunteers reached the house on 7 June, just before the ceremony.
Stopping a wedding is only the first step. Under rules described by Al Jazeera, girls rescued from child marriages in the area are sent to rehabilitation centres for at least 40 days for counselling, training and, where needed, a return to school. Workers like Mukherjee are often the first link in that chain.
In 2023 the 1098 helpline passed from the Childline India Foundation, which had run it since 1996, to state governments under the Centre’s Mission Vatsalya scheme, according to the foundation. West Bengal’s handover was due by the end of August 2023. The number still works, and the need in the Sundarbans has not gone away. IPB’s Third Eye report, Child marriage in the Sundarbans, looks at why.
How you can help
- If you know of a child marriage being planned, call 1098 (free, 24 hours) or the police on 112. Speed matters: in Basanti, help arrived just before the ceremony began.
- Tell a teacher, the panchayat or the village child protection committee. In Basanti, it was a girl’s own friends who spoke up in time.
- After a cyclone or flood, ask relief groups you donate to whether their work includes keeping girls in school.
This profile is based on published reports. Know Bunty or his work? Write to editor@indiapeopleblog.com.
More people doing quiet good in Candlelight.
Sources: The Telegraph (via AHA Foundation), June 2020 · IPB News, 14 June 2020 · Al Jazeera, 14 April 2021 · Childline India Foundation, August 2023
