Sahebganj, Sept. 11: Eighteen-year-old Suramani runs home at the sight of men. The vivacious tribal girl is a frail shadow of her former self. An abortive bid by a middleman to sell her at a brothel in Delhi has scarred her. She prefers to stay indoors for better part of the day.

Barely two weeks after a dozen tribal children from Maharajpur block were rescued by the Punjab police, officers of the Ranga police station last week thwarted attempts by middlemen to sell two girls of the endangered Pahariya tribe to brothels outside the state. Police sources said the middlemen had taken a hefty amount from the kingpins in Delhi to bring the Pahariya girls to the national capital. The Ranga police have arrested one of the two middlemen involved in the racket.

The accused, Marioum Das, had approached the tribal girls Surmani and Santamoni (names changed) with promises of jobs in Delhi. Das and his associate had even booked tickets for the girls on a Delhi-bound express train but their plans failed to take-off when the father of one of the girls complained to the police.

“I doubted their intention when one of the men asked my daughter to spend the night with him a day before the journey,” the girl’s father said.

Officer in-charge of Ranga police station, Sivnarayan Kamath, said his department swung into action soon after the complaint was lodged. Das was arrested and he spilled the beans about his gang operating from New Delhi. He also confessed to plans of selling the Pahariya girls to brothels there. His associate, Surya Das, managed to evade arrest.

The drought-ravaged Santhal Pargana districts have become a haven for women traffickers, who prey on girls from vanishing tribes with promises of “bright lights and big city dreams.’’ A group of children from Maharajpur had also been lured with promises of job and food and then sold in Punjab to be trained as pickpockets and thieves.

In June, Lobin Hembrom, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha legislator from Borio Assembly constituency had ensured the release of seven tribal girls from the district, who had been sold to contractors in Burdwan, West Bengal. They had been assured jobs in brick kilns and then sexually assaulted. Hembrom’s intervention had made it possible for the girls to return home after five months of exploitation.

A month before, two tribal girls from Rajmahal subdivision had managed to escape the clutches of those running a flesh trade racket in New Delhi. They had been brought to New Delhi with promises of jobs and then sold in the Middle East. They were subjected to inhuman physical and mental torture for three months, before they mustered enough courage to escape. The local police did not follow up the case and the culprits remained traceless. Hembrom held the NDA-led government in the state responsible for the spiralling job racket in Santhal Pargana.

“Chief minister Babulal Marandi failed to understand the plight of tribals in the state. Government apathy has hit the rural economy,’’ he said.

who started migrating in large numbers due to absence of agriculture and alternative job opportunities. And the poor people, particularly the tribals, fell prey to middlemen in the course of migration,” he said.