The Trafficking Tragedy and the Feminine Face of Poverty in India

In 2007, an independent regional research study (Human Trafficking and HIV: Exploring Vulnerabilities and Responses in South Asia 2007), commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme, stated that South Asia alone accounts for more than half of the 300,000 to 450,000 people trafficked every year in the entire continent of Asia. The South Asian region, being one of the most densely populated areas in the world, is also impaired with a peak condition of poverty, low education, critical health problems and excessive practices of gender discrimination. Such a situation, and the efforts to address it, is strongly influenced by the unstable political environment that has interminably dogged the nations of the region except for India, which enjoys both political stability and an emerging economic power status. But, its comparative achievements are actually counterbalanced by the staggering prevalence of trafficking inside its borders. While other smaller, poor and conflict-affected South Asian countries like Nepal and Bangladesh are only a source of trafficking, India alone remains but not just a source, but also a major destination and transit country for trafficking of women and children.

The United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Trafficking (UNGIFT) has identified a cycle of demand and supply that has been responsible for the trafficking of women and children across the globe. In case of India, this holds very much true since, on the one hand, it is witnessing a rapid economic growth, ending up catering to the newer, legitimate as well as illegitimate, demands of globalization, and, on the other hand, seventy-percent of its total population still lives on less than a dollar a day (according to a 2007 report released by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector). While urban areas have been demonstrating great advances in terms of education, health and infrastructure, many parts of rural India are still submerged in abject poverty, high-level of illiteracy and poor access to basic healthcare. It is also a fact that poverty in a diverse country like India is not uniform, with differences ranging from ten to 40 percent of people living below the poverty line in various parts.