uncertain future

New Delhi, Oct. 4: Roma Debabrata still recalls the voice on her cellphone, offering her Rs 60,000, then Rs 800,000, to forget the 15-year-old girl she had just plucked out of a brothel in the capital’s red light zone.

She had just rescued a victim of human trafficking, and was ferrying her to a police station when the voice on the phone asked her to drop the girl on the street, pitching the “chai-pani” allurement to her — and to the senior police officer in the car.

“I’ve seen the best of police officers and the worst of them,” said Debabrata, the founder president of STOP, an organisation campaigning to stop the oppression of children and women. “This gentleman rejected the offer and helped me save the girl.”

But, she said, cases from years ago are still dragging on in courts. Sometimes, the rescued girls tear themselves away from “rehabilitation” and return to sex trade. UN officials estimate that some 150,000 people are trafficked across South Asia each year, primarily for sexual exploitation but also for labour and forced marriages.

The average age of girls trafficked has decreased from 14-16 years during the mid-1980s to 10-14 years during the mid-1990s. “Now we have even younger girls,” said Gary Lewis, representative of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), New Delhi, who once met an eight-year-old trafficked girl in Andhra Pradesh. “There’s a perception that younger people means a lower risk of infection,” Lewis said.

Activists, lawyers and UN officials said they appear to be battling human trafficking in an environment of indifference and ignorance. One survey showed that 80 per cent of police officers give low or nil priority to trafficking.

Next week, the UNODC and the Indian government will jointly hold a two-day conference to discuss strategies to counter trafficking, protect its victims and formulate a “Delhi Declaration” that is expected to guide future action.

“The existing law is very strong but customers (of trafficking victims) should be seen as plain criminals,” said P.M. Nair, a UNODC coordinator engaged in a three-year project to improve the police response to trafficking.

Under the project, some 8,000 police officers in Bengal, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Goa have been trained to combat trafficking. Over the past six months, 1,008 traffickers have been arrested, Nair said.