Sundargarh/Bhubaneswar: Lulikidihi, a remote village of Sundargarh district which was well-known for producing internationally famed hockey players like Ignace Tirki, Prabodh Tirki and Deep Grace Ekka, is in news again, but for wrong reasons.
A ground report of OTV shows the picture in the district. Many families in the village, which borders with Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, have a story to tell as their daughters, who went outside the State to earn good money, have either come back home after undergoing a lot of torture with bruises or pain or gone out of touch with their families.
A girl of around 15 years of the village has lost her mental balance. Reason, the young woman had suffered so much torture in Delhi, where she had gone with the help of a middleman to earn Rs 10,000 per month, she is not able to speak properly.
Mother of the tortured girl said, “A middleman took my daughter to Jharkhand and promised Rs 10,000 per month. But, after her return she is not in a balanced state of mind. My daughter is saying she was beaten up and being forced to do immoral things.”
In another family of the village, out of three daughters, two had gone to Delhi nine years back. The younger daughter managed to escape from Delhi after suffering from torture recently. Whereabouts of the other daughter is still to be known to the family.
The girl, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “I worked there for two months. As there was no information about my elder sister who also went there, my family members asked me to come back. Somehow I managed to escape.”
Similarly, another woman does not have any information about her two daughters, who were taken by a middleman on the pretext of providing jobs.
As per the data provided by an NGO ‘Pragati’, as many as 45,000 young women of the district have been trafficked outside the State till date. Of them, 13,000 are still missing.
Pragati’s secretary Rajendra Behera said, “Middlemen are taking the girls outside the State on the pretext of false promises. We have seen many of them return after becoming mother and tortured there.”
Meanwhile, the Sudargarh district administration steps are being taken after setting up of a three-tier committee.
Collector of the district Bhupinder Singh Punia said, “We have formed three-layered committees on trafficking and sensitizing people on the issue.”