Assam girl flees traffickers, aids arrest of three

Assam resident Madhumita (name changed), 16, had a smile on her face when on Wednesday she met her father in Delhi after being forced into the flesh trade here a month ago.

Updated on: Jan 31, 2009, 13:33:29 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Assam resident Madhumita (name changed), 16, had a smile on her face when on Wednesday she met her father in Delhi after being forced into the flesh trade here a month ago.

Inspired by the film Ghajini, in which a girl escapes from the clutches of human traffickers, Madhumita broke free from a South Delhi brothel with a customer’s help last week. Not only that, she helped the police arrest three persons who trafficked her from Assam.

Four other girls were also rescued from the inter-state gang trafficking in women and children.

Madhumita was duped into leaving her village in Assam’s Nagaon district, 128 km east of Guwahati, by her neighbour Saleem. She wanted to go to her father’s village to meet him but was not being allowed to do so by her husband. When she narrated her woe to Saleem, he readily offered to take her to her father. “I agreed and went with him,” she said.

When she and Saleem were near the Brahmaputra River, she realised he was taking her elsewhere.

“When I asked, Saleem threatened me,” Madhumita said, adding that they reached a railway station. There she found three other girls whom Saleem’s associates had brought. They were bundled into a coach and brought them to Delhi. A day after they reached the Sarai Kale Khan area of South Delhi, Madhumita and the others were forced into prostitution.

The teenager saw a glimmer of hope last week when one of the clients agreed to let her use his mobile to speak to her father. The client also helped her escape from Saleem’s brothel in Sarai Kale Khan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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