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By Ashutosh Mishra
Bhubaneswar: Fuelled by grinding poverty trafficking of women from different parts of the state has emerged as a major challenge for the law-enforcing authorities. The social dimension of this inhuman trade is just as shocking as its criminal aspect. In most cases, young women are practically sold by impoverished families to middlemen who promise to find them, suitable grooms. Sometimes the families are actually introduced to the prospective grooms. The girls almost invariably end up in brothels. Those who don’t find themselves tied to much older men who, apart from exploiting them sexually, force them to perform domestic chores under humiliating circumstances. They are worse than maidservants.
Most of these cases have been reported from districts like Sundergarh and Kendrapara with poverty being a common factor in the case of almost all victim families. While in Sundergarh a majority of victims hail from the district’s tribal pockets where poverty is acute in Kendrapara the traffickers have targeted families financially ruined by natural calamities. Cases of trafficking had gone up significantly in the coastal district in the wake of 1999 super-cyclone which had left behind a trail of death and destruction.
With the gale not only damaging their houses but also blowing away their means of livelihood a large number of families in Kendrapara’s rural belt had found survival to a be struggle. With no money left to perform the marriage of grown-up girls parents easily fell into the trap of the traffickers who promised to arrange grooms for them in states like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. In many cases, the prospective grooms, who were actually pimps, themselves visited the villages to meet the parents and offer them money. The cash-strapped families accepted the money which, for all practical purposes, turned the so-called marriage into a deal.
While the girls thus sold by their families invariably found themselves leading miserable lives, exploited sexually and otherwise, the parents sought to salve their conscience by lodging police cases when some of these girls managed to escape and returned home to narrate their ordeals. Such cases were few and far between but they helped expose the racket and also brought to light its social ramifications.
Non-governmental organisations working in the field estimate that traffickers masquerading as prospective grooms manage to trap around 100 girls every year from the seaside villages of Kendrapara where poverty is acute. Minor girls, too, are being trafficked. The phenomenon has been aptly described as bride trafficking by activists fighting the menace.
In Sundergarh there have also been cases of women being sent out of the country. In 2017 two married women from the district returned home from Saudi Arabia to narrate the harrowing tale of physical and mental exploitation at the hands of middlemen and their employers in the foreign country. Activists campaigning against trafficking had then claimed that a study conducted in 11 blocks of the tribal-dominated district had revealed that more than 13,000 women of different age groups were missing.
That is an alarming figure. With the situation apparently having deteriorated in the following years the state government needs to address this problem urgently. We must put an end to this vile trade in women.
(DISCLAIMER: This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are the author’s own and have nothing to do with OTV’s charter or views. OTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same)
