Every year, almost 45,000 Indian children are trafficked by well-connected, highly organised gangs. Many are never found and, even if they are, their communities treat them with disdain. Brian O'Connellreports
The village of Kulpi, in the heart of west Bengal, is one of many rural outposts that pepper the Ganges delta. For non-locals, it's a bit tricky to find - you'll have to park the car and walk the last few hundred yards. There, in a village of mud huts, grass roofs and the finest coconut juice this side of Jamaica, the Khatun family reside just beyond the bridge at the entrance to the village. For years, the Khatuns were a regular west Bengal family. Father worked the fields and didn't speak much, while mother, who spoke plenty, cooked, tended to crops and made clothing. Their two daughters rowed in when they could, while a share in a prawn bed and a strong local barter system ensured that generally no one went too hungry. Mostly, the Khatuns kept to themselves, in as much as one could in a village of open houses and strong community ties.
Those community ties were severely tested a year ago when the Khatun family became victims of an increasingly sophisticated and highly organised trafficking ring, criss-crossing India from Bengal to Bombay. Suddenly, life didn't seem so routine anymore.
Seventeen-year-old Golehara Khatun is still a little wary of strangers, as she recalls the day she went to visit a relative's house and didn't come back. It was a house she often visited and, without her knowing, a number of locals were taking a keen interest in Golehara's striking good looks.
On this occasion they approached the naive teenager with the offer of a job in Calcutta, three hours' drive away. "If you come with us you will soon have many things," they told her, "including shoes, nice clothes and a good place to live." Golehara took a chance.
"It was my first time away from the village," said Golehara. "The people told me I must say that they were my uncles if the police stopped us. They put me in a house in Kashmir, and different boys and men used to come and see me and decide whether or not they would buy me. I was eventually sold to a very old man." Golehara was kept in an apartment building and not allowed to go outside. Over time, she made friends with a local boy by communicating from an upstairs window and, with his help, was able to get a message back to her village. She pleaded with her purchaser to allow her return home. "I was there for a month and I kept asking him to let me go home. He said, 'you have been sold and you can't just ask to go back'. The man was trying to force himself on me so one day I threw a knife at him. It was a very hard time." When word reached Golehara's mother, Bibi, that her daughter was being held against her will in Kashmir, she immediately went to the local police station and asked for help.
"No one would help me. They all said, 'where is the proof that your daughter has been trafficked?" she says. Bibi realised she would have to travel to Kashmir herself if she was to achieve any results. To fund the journey, the family pawned what they owned, including patches of land, machinery, even down to their kitchen utensils.
"In Kashmir, the police again tried to silence me. 'It's your own local problem,' they said, 'don't involve us in it'. Eventually I came across a sympathetic police captain who organised a team to try and rescue my daughter," says Bibi. "We travelled to the building where she knew she was being held. She was all by herself on the first floor of the building.
"We called for her and she came down. We asked the man, 'For how much have you bought Golehara?' and he said '45,000 rupees [ €824]'. He came to the police station and said, 'I have bought this girl for money, now someone needs to give us back the money'. That's how corrupt the system has become."
Golehara returned to the village, but not everyone in the community accepted her. Local men would break open her window and try to grab her at night and she was too afraid to shout or make a scene in case the people who trafficked her returned.
At this point, the Hope Foundation, an Irish charity working out of Calcutta, stepped in and helped liaise between Golehara and the villagers. Little by little, villagers accepted her back into the community, and the name-calling and late-night antics stopped. "We are feeling comfortable at this moment. It's not so much of a nightmare now," says Golehara.
Yet because she was trafficked, her parents are finding it increasingly difficult to arrange a marriage partner for her. "There is a tailor in Calcutta who would be a good match," says her mother. "But he is looking for 30,000 rupees [ €550] as a dowry. Unless we can negotiate on that figure, the prospects aren't good." Golehara may have escaped from her captors, but her future remains uncertain. If a match isn't found, "she will work more", her mother says.
GOLEHARA IS ONE of the lucky ones; she made it back. Thousands of parents throughout India are in a less fortunate position, with little chance of getting their children back. Child trafficking, traditionally associated with trafficking for commercial sex, is soaring in India. The authorities, apparently unaware of the scale of the problem, have made little attempt to mitigate it and the statistical information available merely hints at its magnitude.
According to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), every year an average of 44,476 children go missing in India. Of these, 11,008 are never traced.
The NHRC, in its report "Action Research on Trafficking in Women and Children in India" (2002-03), suggests that many of the missing children are not really missing but are instead trafficked. Most end up in forced adoptions and marriages, child labour markets or working in the entertainment industry, of which sex tourism is the most recent aspect.
According to figures provided by the National Crime Records Bureau, in 2004, as many as 2,265 cases of kidnapping and abduction of children qualified as forms of trafficking and were reported to the police. Of these, 1,593 cases were of kidnapping for marriage, 414 were for illicit sex, 92 for unlawful activity, 101 for prostitution and the rest for various other things such as slavery, begging and even selling body parts. Most of these children (72 per cent) were between 16 and 18 years of age. Twenty-five per cent were children aged 11-15 years.
Travelling in India last month, at the invitation of the Hope Foundation, I witnessed the anguish caused by child trafficking and the lack of political will to tackle it.
The account begins half a kilometre from the border with Bangladesh, in the village of Godindapur, close to the Ichamati River. Huddled in an outbuilding, locals from the surrounding area had gathered to tell stories of sons and daughters who had been trafficked. For some, it had taken half a day to get there, travelling by bus or boat and, in many cases, by foot in the searing heat.
A woman in a red sari began by telling us her daughter went missing when she was 11 years old. That was four years ago and, as yet, there is no trace of her. "We have gone to the police, but the people who are involved in this practice give money to the police, so they don't hear us," she says. It was a familiar story we heard time and time again.
Beside her, Taslima Bibi described the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of her 17-year-old girl, Lili-Me, who went missing two months earlier, leaving a young child behind. "She used to go to cut grass in fields and a few boys she met there took her to Bombay. They told her they had work for her in a house, but they have actually sold her. Yesterday I went and named the boys in the police station, but the police said they can't do anything." Her granddaughter, who is three years old, cries constantly for her mother. "She keeps crying," she says, showing a picture of her daughter wearing traditional dress for her uncle's marriage.
Other mothers produced torn pieces of paper with telephone numbers or partial addresses that they hope will eventually lead to their children. The one male villager present says his daughter has been missing for almost two years. She too was lured by the promise of a better life. In this case a local woman was involved in arranging for the girl to be trafficked. When the father went to the police, they asked him to show proof and dismissed him because he didn't support the local ruling party. "India is no longer a civil state," he says. "It is a political one."
I decided to follow the case of 16-year-old Swapna Majumdar, who comes from Paschim Barasat, an adjacent village. Her mother, Putul Kanti, clutched a passport-sized photograph of her daughter, who has been missing since last November.
She outlined the story of her disappearance: "My daughter and another woman used to go to a local village to get materials for clothes that they produced and sold. She was supposed to come back at 2.30pm and didn't turn up. I figured she'd stopped off at a relative's house. Some time later, when she still hadn't turned up, we went to speak to the person who gives raw materials and he said that she left hours ago. When I came back to the village, all the locals said she must have eloped with a boy. But my daughter didn't mix with any boy. I knew something was wrong."
AS THE DAYS PASSED, it became clear that Swapna had been trafficked, and her parents began to fear the worst. Their suspicions were confirmed when a call came through to a relative's mobile asking that Swapna's father be contacted and leaving an address in Pune, a city of 4.5 million, 120km inland from Bombay. After the call, her father and brother went to Pune to search for her. Swapna managed to call once more and gave sketchy details about where she was being held. Her captors kept moving her from place to place, she said, and again she pleaded for someone, to come quickly and rescue her. Despite extensive searches, her father and brother returned home empty-handed.
"My daughter was very smart," says her mother. "I am proud of her. She didn't have too much education but she was very smart in the ways of the world. She was an extrovert and she would always talk with people. As such, she was popular among locals."
The day before I arrived, her husband, Tushar Kanti, had again left the village and was heading back to Pune to search for Swapna. To fund the first trip, the family had to sell a tree for 7,000 rupees (€129). This time, the Hope Foundation helped out, yet, even still, this is the last time the family will be able to go and search for Swapna.
"The last time, my husband was gone for six days and came back without finding her," says Putul, "This time we are very hopeful. But every time he goes away, our small fruit shop is closed and we have no income so it becomes a double price to pay. If we do get her back, my husband is saying that he will not let her stay here in this village as villagers think she eloped with a boy. It might not be possible for her to settle back in the village again. The Hope Foundation has been a great assistance to us so far."
THE NEXT DAY, at the Hope Foundation offices in Calcutta, volunteers were discussing the front page of a national newspaper, the Hindu. The headline story concerned Babubhai Katara, an MP and prominent member of the opposition, who was caught trying to smuggle two people out of the country. Katara, who was subsequently remanded to 10 days in police custody, tried to take a woman and a child abroad on his wife's diplomatic passport. In the days after his arrest, more cases of high-ranking officials using forged documents to smuggle people out of the country came to light. It confirmed a suspicion that trafficking in India permeates every level of society from high office to rice fields.
For Geeta Venkatakrishnan, director of the Hope Foundation, there was little surprise in the news. While internationally, India is being marketed as the world's fastest-growing economy, for many the gap between rich and poor is widening dramatically. "India may be blooming economically, but the government still doesn't plan for the children most in need," says Venkatakrishnan. "There are so many children still on the street and so many people still below the poverty line. In other countries, if people don't work they get food or shelter. But in India we don't have that. A huge proportion of our wealth goes to the military, to the border areas, or for protecting our country. So on the one hand maybe the economy is blooming up, but on the other side nothing is changing." In some villages, where land is being bought for industrial purposes, farmers are being forced into cities to look for work, with little in the way of compensation. The displacement is also leaving children vulnerable, and easy prey for experienced traffickers.
"Villagers are becoming attracted to the city because in some cases the land is being occupied for industries such as IT or manufacturing. We are also seeing a huge rise in the rate of drug and alcohol addiction, and of course trafficking is a constant issue," says Venkatakrishnan, who highlights education as the key to building a more equitable society. The Hope Foundation reaches out to 18,000 children directly. "Education brings a lot of change," she says. "Children start asking about their basic rights, and also tell parents of their expectations. All the children have their own dreams, and they want four walls and a roof, and not to be living on the street with the threat of eviction hanging over them. That is their entitlement."
Next we headed for Pune, where we had arranged to meet with Tushar Kanti, Swapna's father. After a three-hour flight, Kanti and a project worker met us at a hotel near the city's main railway station. It had taken them 36 hours to get there by train, and their efforts were being thwarted at every turn by local bureaucracy. The mood was one of despondency. I helped them enlarge a picture of Swapna at a local internet cafe, and watched as they moved from street to street, chasing what seemed like dead-end leads.
After two days, the city became too oppressive, and my presence was doing little to help the delicate rescue operation. Hopes of finding Swapna were fast fading, and with resources tight, her father had only a few days left before returning home. I could sense that I was in the way. Sitting into the back of a rickshaw, we said our goodbyes. I wished them luck, and watched as they knocked on doors with an A4 print and fading hope.
Swapna Majumdar was rescued by her father, from a massage parlour in Pune's red light district on April 23rd, three days later.
• The Hope Foundation was set up in 1999 by three Cork women. It works primarily with street children in Calcutta, providing formal and non-formal education, a nutrition programme and health care for the children.
Next week, Hope founder Maureen Forrester will travel to India to accept the Bharat Nirman Award, in recognition of the organisation's work with underprivileged children. For more information, see www.hopefoundation.ie. Donations can be made to Hope account, AIB 66 South Mall, Cork: account number 50677162, sort code 936383