Fewer women and girls
reportedly entering shelters, but financial hardship is forcing younger girls
into sex work and forcing some women to work for free
By
Michael Safi in Delhi and William Brown in Kolkata
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People in Ahmedabad wait
for a bank to open so that they can withdraw
and deposit money.
Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters
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India’s rupee recall appears to have had “a
massive impact” on the country’s human trafficking industry, according to
advocacy and rescue groups, with some reporting reductions of up to 90% in the
number of women and girls being admitted to their shelters.
But other activists said the illegal trade
was already rebounding, and that the financial strain of demonetisation on poor
communities was pushing new, younger girls into sex work, and forcing women
already in the industry to work for credit or for free.
The Guardian contacted 10 human trafficking
advocacy and rescue groups to assess the impact of the Indian government’s
shock decision last month to scrap the country’s two most used bank notes.
The decision, which voided 86% of the currency
in circulation in India and has left the country’s informal economy reeling,
was justified partly on the basis that it would deprive criminal groups,
including traffickers, of their cash stockpiles. But Indians too have been
deprived of cash, limited to withdrawals of 2,500 rupees (£30) a day and
stymied by long lines at ATMs and outside banks.
Demonetisation complicated every point in the
human trafficking supply chain, starting with a “drastic reduction in the
number of sex buyers”, said Sunita Krishnan, the co-founder of Prajwala, a
Hyderabad-based NGO that rescues victims of sex slavery.
The dearth of customers for sex workers meant
“it obviously did not make any sense to induct any new girls in this period”,
Krishnan said. “In my shelter home, on average every month 60 to 70 new,
rescued victims are admitted. From 8 November [the day demonetisation was
announced] in the last 40 days, only six new victims have been admitted.
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“I have been on this mission for more than
two decades, and this is the first time I’ve seen the entire flesh trade so
badly affected.”
There are 18 million people living in slavery
in India, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, with about 135,000
children believed to be trafficked in the country every year.
Ashok Rajgor, the chief investigation officer
at the Rescue Foundation, said no formal surveys had been conducted, “but our
operatives in the field have noticed a sharp change”.
Fewer customers for brothels meant that
traffickers had less capital to buy and transport women and girls from states
such as Jharkhand, Assam and Bihar, all hubs for the trade.
“The market is totally down,” he said. “When
you buy a girl, it’s a huge amount of money, maybe 200,000 rupees. It’s really
big money and nowadays it’s very difficult to get that kind of cash.”
But he added: “The traffickers will look for
other options. It’s too early to say how, but they’ll manage.”
The introduction of a new 2,000-rupee note,
while supplies of small change remained scarce, had distorted the market,
making younger girls more vulnerable, said Ruchira Gupta, the founder of Apne
Aap, an NGO that works with women across Bihar and in Mumbai, Delhi and
Kolkata.
“The demand for younger girls is going up,”
Gupta said. “Now that [they] have only 2,000 rupee notes, clients don’t want
older women, they want virgins and underage girls.”
She said the financial impact of
demonetisation had left some women without enough money to buy food and their
daughters at risk of being pushed into sex work.
Pimps, who in some red-light districts will
take up to 70% of what a sex worker is paid, were beginning to force women to
work for credit, she added.
“Women’s debt is increasing. Where we work in
[the Delhi red light district] GB Road, I’m being told that brothel managers
have started to keep log books, promising to pay the women later,” she said.
“These women are being asked to work for free. They have to sleep with as many
man as the pimps say just to have a bed and a meal.”
Other women were paid in old, invalid 500
rupee notes. “And the pimps are forcing them to take the money. [The women]
have to stand at the bank for hours ever day [to exchange or deposit the
notes]. Their income has been dramatically reduced,” she said.
Swati Maliwal, the head of the Delhi
Commission for Women, which has been campaigning to have GB Road shut down and
the women working there retrained, said her teams had observed similar
phenomena. “The exploitation of women on GB Road has increased tremendously
because men are coming and not paying them properly,” she said, adding that
some women had started sleeping with up to 30 men each day to make ends meet.
Often, trafficked women lacked the identity
papers required to set up a bank account to exchange void currency for new notes
– meaning some had seen their cash savings wiped out, said Urmi Basu, head of
the Kolkata-based New Light Foundation. “There are thousands of women who have
no documentation, no bank accounts, apart from a few hundred rupees they tuck
under their blouses,” she said.
A “very big slowdown” had been observed in
the child labour trade, said Rakesh Singhal, from the NGO Bachpan Bachao
Andolan.
He said his organisation – whose founder,
Kailash Satyarthi, won the Nobel peace prize in 2014 for his work – had
commissioned a study of the impact of demonetisation on the industry.
“But we have observations that show a very
big slowdown,” Singhal said. “Most of the placement agencies for children say
there is no domestic child labour supply.
“The whole trafficking industry runs on
liquid money, you’re paying the whole supply chain, including agents in village
areas, who are paying between 5,000 and 10,000 rupees for each child.”
All agreed the decline in the trade was
likely to be temporary. “Trafficking is an organised crime, and traffickers and
people involved in this crime adapt to newer means whenever there is a change
in situations and the external environment,” said Prabhat Kumar, the general
manager of Save the Children, India.
