At a press conference here on Thursday, company spokesman Ram Priya Das said Mangalore Ganesh Beedi has been manufacturing beedis for five decades and it has never been accused of using child labour. ``Rolling beedis is a semi-skilled job done specifically by adults to get quality rolled beedis,'' he said, adding that the company is abiding by the Supreme Court ban order on employing child labour.

Rejecting the US government's charge, he said there was a 15 per cent fall in demand for beedis. And without a workload, where is the need to employ children, he asked. Presently, the company's beedi exports stand at $ 60,000 per year, he claimed.

Das said the company has notreceived any complaints about its contractors using children to roll beedis, but promised to look into it nevertheless. When told that it was common practice for private companies to use children to roll beedis, he said he wasn't aware of such companies.

Das said, ``One Margaret Ibrahim visited the office introducing herself as a representative of CBS and brought in a camera crew.'' She took shots of the statutory warning printed on the covers of beedi bundles and also visited godowns. But she did not send us the video of the factory shots as she had promised.

Das claimed their US-based agents, Nasara Interntaional Agency, told them that apparently the US Administration is verifying the CBS programme and has taken only a ``temporary measure.'' But Ganesh Beedi, he said, was most worried and offended by the humiliation doled out to India using ``baseless charges''.

Asked whether the company would want the Centre to intervene, Das said the ``public should decide whether India should face such humiliationfrom the USA''. The US Government, he added, ``should have collected detailed information before making out the temporary custom detention order''.

As expected, the Mysore Division Beedi Workers' Union has also condemned the US action and asked the Centre to stop ``advanced countries from linking trade with other issues''.