Many children in Sundarbans are left behind in school hostels or with elderly grandparents when their parents migrate elsewhere in search of work. Photo: EPA
Srijita Bhangi, 11, sits in the waiting room of the jetty boat that connects her island home in Khulna to the mainland Sundarbans, near India's border with Bangladesh.
After spending a few days with her elderly grandparents – an effort to lift her most recent spell of depression – she is travelling back to the school hostel where she has lived since her parents left two years ago to find work in a garment factory 1,000km away, in Tamil Nadu.
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