Govt to compensate victims of trafficking

The Ministry of Women and Child Development will compensate victims of human trafficking in an attempt to integrate them into the social mainstream, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 8, 2006, 01:10:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Ministry of Women and Child Development will compensate victims of human trafficking in an attempt to integrate them into the social mainstream. They will now be on a par with rape victims.

Ministry sources said the proposal is an extension of a "pilot scheme" underway in districts where trafficking of women and children is rampant. "We propose to increase the scope of the scheme to the entire country," a senior ministry official told the Hindustan Times.

Under the scheme, envisaged for the 11th five-year-plan, the Centre will provide funds for the rehabilitation of women rescued from brothels or red-light areas and the state governments will chip in with infrastructure and logistics.

Statistics cite that over 1.5 lakh women are traded in India every year and most of them land up in red-light areas or work as semi-labour in industrial cities.

The 2006 Trafficking of Persons report said India has failed to furnish evidence of increasing efforts to address human trafficking. United States has put India under Tier 2 Watch List for the third consecutive year. A ministry official said the scheme would help those who are not accepted by their families when they return.

"We have found that many rescued women go back to the brothels as they face harassment back home," an official said, quoting recent reports.

The ministry also observed that the trafficking network has spread to poor districts and areas hit by natural calamities.

For the first-time, each state and Union Territory has appointed nodal officers tasked with the job to co-ordinate efforts to check human trafficking. Four regional cells have also been constituted. "Enforcement of law can only work when the rescued victims get a chance to start life afresh. And, the way is vocational training and a compensation package," an official explained, adding that the amount will be decided after consulting the Planning Commission.

A study by the Centre of Concern for Child Labour has identified four pockets with high incidence of human trafficking.

Email chetan@hindustantimes.com

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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