Mainu Munda in her kitchen. Picture by Biplab Basak

From today, we carry a three-part story on the rise in women trafficking in north Bengal, which has coincided with a dip in the tea industry’s fortunes. The first part focuses on the closed and sick gardens.

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October 2005: Police rescue five minor girls, all residents of Banarhat and Baradighi in Malbazar, from Siwan in Bihar. Lured by the promise of jobs as domestic helps, these girls were working as nothing more than bonded labourers with an orchestra group with no food and no wages.

Mid 2006: Jalpaiguri police bring back seven girls, all of them below 16 years of age, from a Mumbai red-light area. They had been taken there by “placement agents” from Kalabari in the Dooars to work as domestic helps.

The tea industry of north Bengal is going through the worst recession of its history. Life is tough at the estates and employment opportunities scarce. “Our women folk are the worst sufferers of the crisis,” said Chitta Dey, the convener of the Coordination Committee of Plantation Workers.

A visit to any closed or sick tea garden gives a clear picture of the desperation to which these women are driven.

“My husband died of TB last year,” says Mainu Munda of the closed Raipur tea estate, about 50 km from Siliguri. “The day he died, he had eaten khichdi after going without food for 16 days. We had nothing to eat, leave aside money to buy medicines.” Having recently sent her daughter Asha (16) away to Bagdogra to work as a domestic help, Mainu hopes for better times now.

Eighteen-year-old Rashma Lohar from the same estate is on the lookout for a job. “I would be more than willing to go out and work instead of waiting for the garden to reopen,” says the girl who passed Class-V. She, too, lost her father to tuberculosis about four years ago.

All these make for a fertile ground for “agents”. “The agents get active when workers and their dependants look for alternative employment avenues,” said Rangu Souriya of Kanchenjunga Nari Uddhar Kendra. “The women get tempted by short-term jobs offering good money. It is only after they reach their destinations, sometimes brothels and red-light areas, that they realise they have been trapped into bonded labour.”

Many return, but by then, it is often too late. “Two girls from a tea garden in the Patharghata gram panchayat came back very sick and died within two months,” said Sunil Jha of Child in Need Institute, which runs a UNDP project, Trafficking and HIV/AIDS, in Darjeeling district.

(To be continued)