The global concern for terrorism, rising aspirations for free-markets and human sympathy for the victims of furious nature have sidetracked this global menace even as the trafficking trade picks up its grounds in over half of the world.
A number of non-government organizations and human rights bodies are striving hard and working with the help of the United Nations body for child, Unicef to eradicate child and women trafficking from south Asia and especially India. The Unicef itself has gory facts of the global trade and trafficking of women and kids and even India's top human rights body, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is besieged with the problem.
Unicef figures say that around 7000 female child are trafficked from Nepal to India every year and most of them land in flesh trade. Around 200,000 Bangladeshi women have been trafficked into Pakistan via India in the last seven years to be pushed in jobs of inhuman categories, Unicef figures say.
Action Against Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation of Children, an Indian organization against child exploitation says children from India are being illegally trafficked to Europe, Americas and Middle-east countries in huge numbers. An average of 50,000 children are trafficked even to a developed country like United States of America every year, the forum maintains.
Rights activists maintain that criminal syndicates are involved in the female child and women's trafficking from various states of India and this is a major challenge for the local police. The agents of these criminal gangs often strike in the flood or drought affected parts of India where they offer jobs and good life to poverty-stricken people. The poor and starved parents of young girls are also lured that their daughters would get married to good people. Some agents even offer themselves as grooms in disguise, activists said.
In most cases the trafficked children and women are deported to major Indian cities and from they land in foreign lands either in Europe or middle-east countries. The rights activists emphasize on the need for special police patrolling in India's border areas close to Bangladesh and Nepal fearing most trafficking takes place from there.
The eastern Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Nengal along Nepal and Bangladesh borders have emerged as the hub of large-scale smuggling of women and kids, forcing them in flesh trade and bonded labour. The interesting part of the independent probe into the issue has been that quite often, the brutality of local police has been prompting rural women to join extremists, especially the outlawed Maoists in India. The NHRC have been told about the atrocities on Dalit (backward caste untouchables) women and inhuman treatment of women and kids in jails and reform centers, etc which have since long forced them to flee homes and fall in the hands of unscrupulous elements.
An NGO named Bhumika in its research has said that more than 20,000 women from 16 districts of Bihar and West Bengal have disappeared over the last ten years. These women are being lured by anti-socials here for jobs and marriage and then forced into flesh trade in metropolitan cities of India. Bhumika has sought NHRC intervention.
The Bachpan Bachao Andolan, another NGO protecting child abuse has complained that large numbers of children from the poor states like Bihar were smuggled to other states and forced to work as labor in hazardous industrial and mining works. Many of them are sexually exploited.
The government officials also admit that the complaints of the activists are genuine but maintain that government agencies have little resources to fight the menace. "Trafficking of women and kids along the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bangladesh borders remains largely unabated. The government is making efforts for destitute women and taking help with Border Security Forces, NGOs and Unicef to curb the trafficking of women", a senior government official said.
The northern parts of the state of Bihar having common boundary with Nepal and a corridor with Bangladesh also happen to be acute poverty zone owing to annual floods that kills hundreds and leaves no scope for farming. Poverty forces the women folks into flesh trade. Girls from flood affected parts and tribal areas of southern parts are also being sold by pimps into flesh trade. Some NGOs also raised the issue of women being lured into extremist cadres as a reaction to their human rights violation. A member of the National Women Commission, has recently raised this issue of growing numbers of rural women joining the Maoists (left wing extremists) because of the torture by police force.
Interestingly, the figures do not include those women who are part of the sexual exploitation racket inside India. There have been media stories over how poor girls from states like Bihar are lured into false marriages and then sold out to the brothels. The local police being too much engrossed with routine law and order crisis of murder loots and kidnappings have seldom viewed the trafficking as a serious crime in their areas. More than often, the local police have the tendency to brush it off branding the women as "characterless" or show the case as that of elopement, giving it an angle of love entanglement.