At least 565 children in the Indian state of West Bengal have been injured or killed by homemade bombs over the past three decades, a BBC Eye investigation has revealed.
So what are these deadly weapons and how are they linked to political violence in West Bengal? And why are so many Bengali children paying the price?
On a clear summer morning in May 1996, six boys from the slums of Calcutta, the capital of the state of West Bengal in India, went out to play cricket in a narrow alley.
Their slum, located in a middle-class neighborhood in Jodhpur Park, was teeming with life. It was a holiday – the day of voting in national elections.
Nine-year-old Puchu Sardar, one of the boys, grabbed a cricket bat and quietly slipped past his sleeping father. Soon the crack of the ball meeting the bat echoed down the lane.
A ball kicked out of the makeshift field prompted the boys to search for it in a small garden nearby. There they found six round objects in a black polyethylene bag.
They looked like cricket balls that someone had left behind and the boys went back to playing with their loot.
One of the “balls” from the bag was thrown to Pucha, who hit him with a bat.
A deafening explosion swept through the alley. It was a bomb.
When the smoke cleared and neighbors rushed outside, they found Pucha and five of his friends sprawled in the street with blackened skin, burnt clothes and torn bodies.
Screams pierced the chaos.
Seven-year-old Raju Das, an orphan raised by his aunt, and seven-year-old Gopal Biswas died of their injuries. Four more guys were injured.
Puchu barely survived, suffering severe burns and shrapnel wounds to his chest, face and abdomen.
He spent more than a month in the hospital. When he got home, he had to use kitchen tongs to remove the shrapnel that was still in his body because his family ran out of money to pay for further medical care.
