An unknown number of children, some tens of thousands, were orphaned. Many others were abandoned, sometimes by the roadside or at orphanages, or sold for as much as two maunds (one maund was roughly equal to ), or as little as one seer () of unhusked rice, or for trifling amounts of cash. Sometimes they were purchased as household servants, where they would "grow up as little better than domestic slaves". They were also purchased by sexual predators. Altogether, according to Greenough, the victimisation and exploitation of these women and children was an immense social cost of the famine. Relief efforts Aside from the relatively prompt but inadequate provision of humanitarian aid for the cyclone-stricken areas around Midnapore beginning in October 1942, the response of both the Bengal Provincial Government and the Government of India was slow. A "non-trivial" yet "pitifully inadequate" amount of aid began to be distributed from private charitable organisations in the early months of 1943 and increased through time, mainly in Calcutta but to a limited extent in the countryside. In April, more government relief began to flow to the outlying areas, but these efforts were restricted in scope and largely misdirected, with most of the cash and grain supplies flowing to the relatively wealthy landowners and urban middle-class (and typically Hindu) bhadraloks. This initial period of relief included three forms of aid: agricultural loans (cash for the purchase of paddy seed, plough cattle, and maintenance expenses), grain given as gratuitous relief, and "test works" that offered food and perhaps a small amount of money in exchange for strenuous work. The "test" aspect arose because there was an assumption that if relatively large numbers of people took the offer, that indicated that famine conditions were prevalent. Agricultural loans offered no assistance to the large numbers of rural poor who had little or no land. Grain relief was divided between cheap grain shops and the open market, with far more going to the markets. Supplying grain to the markets was intended to lower grain prices, but in practice gave little help to the rural poor, instead placing them into direct purchasing competition with wealthier Bengalis at greatly inflated prices. Thus from the beginning of the crisis until around August 1943, private charity was the principal form of relief available to the very poor. According to Paul Greenough, the Provincial Government of Bengal delayed its relief efforts primarily