Pilgrim sites turn sex tourism hubs

Puri, Tirupati and Guruvayoor aren’t just famous for their temples. They’re also major hubs of sex tourism involving children. This is the finding of a new study on sex tourism in religious places in India.

Updated on: Mar 13, 2009, 01:15:51 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Puri, Tirupati and Guruvayoor aren’t just famous for their temples. They’re also major hubs of sex tourism involving children. This is the finding of a new study on sex tourism in religious places in India.

According to the year-long ‘India Child Abuse Study 2007’, conducted by international NGO Equations in the three pilgrimage sites of Orissa and Kerala, children — especially boys — are a huge attraction. It says boys from poor families are trafficked to these places for visiting religious tourists.

Children make up nearly 40 per cent (375 million) of India’s population. The country has the dubious distinction of having the largest number of sexually abused children in the world.

In Puri, home to the Jagannath temple, 13 boys who were interviewed said they got anything between Rs 50 and Rs 200 a day. They revealed they preferred foreign tourists to domestic visitors because foreigners gave them chocolates, toys and clothes.

In Tirupati, principal investigator S. Vidya of Equations tracked down nine boys involved in the trade. “The children are contacted on phone or by email from a cyber café and the date and place to meet are fixed,” the study said.

The Andhra Pradesh AIDS Control Society admitted Tirupati, the most visited religious place in the world, had become a “hotspot” for commercial sexual exploitation.

Most of the children come from poor families and are forced into the trade. Once in, chances of getting out are slim. Money is a huge factor in this.

Most children don’t object to the exploitation because they get many things in return. “Foreigners take the children with them for a few days and their families get a handsome amount for this,” the study said.

Compared to Tirupati and Puri, there is less exploitation of children in Guruvayoor. The main reason for this is the ban on child labour, the study said.

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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