Women trafficked for baby boys: UN

Punjab and Haryana continue to exploit the girl child. A new UN report released reveals that girls and women are not only trafficked to these two states to improve the skewed sex ratio but also, and mainly, to bear male children, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Aug 23, 2007, 02:51:57 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Punjab and Haryana continue to exploit the girl child. A new United Nations report released on Wednesday reveals that girls and women are not only trafficked to these two states to improve the skewed sex ratio but also, and mainly, to bear male children. Once they give birth to a boy, they are usually sexually exploited and either abandoned or passed on to another man.

Punjab and Haryana — two of India’s wealthiest states — also have the dubious distinction of being among the states with the most skewed sex ratios — in the age group of 0-6 — in the country. Punjab has a ratio of 886 girls to 1,000 boys while the number in Haryana is 867.

The districts with the worst sex ratios also come from the two states. The worst offender is Fathegarh Sahib in Punjab, which has a ratio of just 766 girls to a 1,000 boys.

Despite the skewed ratio, the United Nations Development Fund report indicates that the desire for a male child still persists and for that, women are trafficked regularly from Assam and West Bengal. “There is an emerging pattern of trafficking girls from West Bengal and Assam to the more prosperous states of Punjab and Haryana where the gender gap is most acute,” reads the report titled Human Trafficking and HIV: Exploring Vulnerabilities and Responses in South Asia’.

So far, it was believed that poor women from Bihar, Assam and West Bengal, were being trafficked to Punjab and Haryana to fill in the shortage of women for marriage. Now, the study conducted by the UNDP reveals that women are mostly trafficked to bear male children. “The woman is either abandoned or passed on to another man after the birth of the male child,” the study — covering India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal — says.

Terror recruits getting younger

On a different subject, the damning report also notes that extremist outfits in the country have “reportedly” begun recruiting boys aged between eight and 15 years to provide food and deliver ransom notes without arousing the suspicion of the police. “The People's War Group (now Communist Party of India-Maoist) founded these organisations in an attempt to train children to resist police interrogation more effectively,” it reads, adding that tribal girls are reportedly used as couriers in the areas of Adilabad and Dandakaranya.

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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