By Shweta Srinivasan, IANS,
New Delhi : A massive trafficking racket, through which young women are whisked off to Arab countries for prostitution from the porous Nepal border with the collusion of corrupt police officials and even politicians, has been uncovered by a fact-finding team of the National Commission for Women (NCW).
During the investigation in October, the team came across a mafia that abducts young women from villages of Azamgarh district in Uttar Pradesh and forces them into prostitution and sometimes uses them for organ trade. These young women – in the age group 15 to 30 – finally land up in Middle Eastern countries.
Acting on a complaint by an 18-year-old girl from Ahirola village, the NCW set up a team of NGO representatives headed by its member, Wansuk Syiem, to probe the issue.
“The girl, who is a college student, was abducted by two men on a bike in September. They took her to a building in an isolated area where she was chloroformed and rendered unconscious most of the time,” Syeim told IANS.
Syeim said the girl “could not remember what happened when she was unconscious, but medical reports found that she was molested and gang-raped. She managed to escape after two days when her brother rescued her with the help of villagers”.
In her testimony, the girl said that on the night she was abducted she “saw around 15 other young girls” in the building. On the night of her escape, she added, “some vehicles pulled up and the girls were taken away”.
The probe team found after talking to villagers that the girls had been taken to Mumbai and then to Nepal.
Syiem said: “The girl was semiconscious and heard the kidnappers talking about taking the girls to Dubai via Nepal.”
The girl and her family had filed a complaint with the state women’s commission which realised that the problem was much bigger and forwarded it to the NCW. To probe the incident, the team went without police escort, since the nexus involved “some corrupt police officials and an influential politician”.
The NCW member said “the politician involved in this was from the ruling party and had contested but lost the assembly elections”.
“The Azamgarh inquiry is much bigger and not just one isolated incident. Girls are being taken out of the country. It looks like a big operation,” Rishi Kant of the NGO Shaktivahini told IANS.
“The number of trafficked girls is much higher than what we see. To address the problem, we have approached the immigration departments and Air India to provide some data and passport details for profiling immigrants who leave the country,” Kant, who was part of the investigation, said.
He added that the case required intervention of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The NCW team has prepared the report and will submit it to panel chairperson Girija Vyas next week.
Anna Stenhammer, South Asia representative of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), said: “I am aware of this case. And I can tell you that in Uttar Pradesh kidnapping and trafficking have become rampant. But some girls are also trapped with promises of work in Gulf nations.”
“Political will, better policing and sensitisation are crucial for tackling this growing problem,” Stenhammer told IANS.
The UN body is mulling a plan to secure the “point of destination”.
“There is some work in the pipeline. We see victims suffering after they reach there. We have come across a few cases where some women who land up at the embassies are totally traumatised. But there is no redressal at the embassy. So the system here needs to be improved. We want to work on transit shelters,” Anuradha Sen Mookerjee, UNIFEM regional programme officer, told IANS.
According to the CBI, the global human trafficking industry is worth $5-9 billion and an estimated 6-8 million people are annually affected by it. The NCW estimates that 378 districts of India, or 62.5 percent of districts in the country, are affected by trafficking of women and children for commercial sexual exploitation.
(Shweta Srinivasan can be contacted at [email protected])