Mantheesh went to Bhavanisagar camp, 60km from Tirapur. 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 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. 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. 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. At 11 her life is already an extraordinary story of survival. But at the other end of the world nothing has changed for those tiny links in the chain of supply that is meeting the British appetitive for cheaper and cheaper clothing: children like Mantheesh, who works for one of the sacked suppliers. The speed at which Primark acted may mean that its standing in the high street remains secure, its reputation repaired before many of its customers will have even noticed it was tarnished. The retailer said that, as soon as it was alerted to the practices over a month ago by The Observer and the BBC it cancelled new orders with the factories concerned and withdrew thousands of garments from its stores. The firm, owned by Associated British Foods, said it had made the statement to fulfil a responsibility to shareholders, not - as cynics suggested - to lessen the shock of an international exposé. Primark sacked the three suppliers before being hit by a wave of negative publicity inevitably coming its way from the documentary. 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. 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. Worth an estimated £5bn, the Primark chain now has 4.8 million sq feet of retail space across 177 stores in three countries, employing 25,000 people. Other major retailers are scrambling to follow the cheap, fast and fashionable concept - for good reason. 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 & Spencer as Britain's biggest mass-market fashion retailer by 2009, taking £1 of every £10 spent on clothing in the UK. Last week, in an announcement that effectively pre-empted publication by The Observer of this investigation, Primark announced it had sacked three of its clothing suppliers in India after being told by the BBC's Panorama programme of evidence that it was subcontracting labour to child workers.
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