Human trafficking is the third largest illegal industry after arms and drugs. In Tehelka, Neha Dixit meets both traffickers and young victims to tell a chilling tale.
EVEN THOUGH India’s poverty rate has dropped from 60 to 42 percent according to the World Bank, the number of Indians scraping by on less than Rs 60 a day is at an astronomical 467 million. That hunger has almost half the Indian population in its grip is not all that this figure implies. Among huge swathes of India’s poor, life is little more than a bare, often brutalised attempt at staying alive, a struggle in many cases hijacked by human trafficking, deemed by the United Nations the world’s third-largest illicit industry, after arms and drugs. Extreme poverty and the low premium traditionally placed on female lives sees thousands of girls, most of them more children than women, sold into unmitigated hell by family members and acquaintances. As TEHELKA witnessed at close range during a three-month investigation, the grievous trade in human lives is plied not only in the country’s brothels, but in urban domestic placement agencies and rural bride markets as well.
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