Homesick, but nowhere to go

The fight against trafficking of women has suffered a setback with parent countries, writes Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Sep 11, 2006, 04:11:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The fight against trafficking of women has suffered a setback with parent countries — from where they are smuggled to India — refusing to take the “human cargo” back.

Bangladesh — from where the bulk of the women is brought to India for flesh trade — is the stumbling block. The remand homes are crammed with Bangladeshi sex workers and the neighbouring country is not willing to take them back.

The surge is getting bigger by the day with brisk rescue operations by NGOs and the law enforcement agencies. At present, over 4,000 Bangladeshi women are languishing in remand homes across India.

Last week, the state governments apprised the “Central Advisory Committee on Combating of Women and Children for Commercial Sexual Exploitation” of the ground reality and sought its help to repatriate Bangladeshi women to their hometowns. “Efforts by the state government to repatriate these women have failed,” an official of Women and Child Development ministry admitted. The situation has also ruffled the women and child development ministry’s feathers. Minister Renuka Chowdhury stressed on a “protocol to repatriate women from SAARC countries.”

“There is a need to develop a road map for the repatriation of these women in a human manner,” she said.

An action plan is on the way. The Unicef has been tasked with an exploratory study to identify roadblocks and suggest remedial measures.

The government estimates that over 80 per cent of foreign women smuggled to India are from the SAARC countries — primarily Bangladesh and Nepal. Repatriation to Nepal is relatively easy. An estimated 1,500 Nepali women are lodged in remand homes.

But Bangladesh poses challenges. “Most Bangladeshi women do not have valid documents to prove they are Bangladeshi citizens. In cases, where citizenship proof is available, the families refuse to take them back,” Roma Debabrata, president of a non-profit group, STOP Trafficking and Oppression of children and women, said.

“It is a unique travesty related to Bangladeshi women,” she said — urging the government to take up the issue with the Ministry of External Affairs. Chowdhury promised that the government will raise the issue in the next SAARC meeting and the external affairs ministry will be asked to devise suitable schemes for the rehabilitation of victims, who are not accepted by the country of their origin.

India has raised the issue of taking back Bangladeshi migrants in the past with Dhaka as the government believes that they skew up the border demography — especially in the northeast.

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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