The Trafficking Tragedy and the Feminine Face of Poverty in India

The states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have some of the highest statistics on poverty. Bihar itself records 43 percent of people living below the poverty line. These states also share the international border with Nepal and the remote and map-less villages in the districts located close to the border are characterised by frequent natural disasters such as floods, which further causes loss of livelihoods to the rural populations, pushing them further into the deeper pits of poverty. As a result, illiteracy is high, gender discrimination is rampant and thereby, trafficking is prevailing here to a high degree.

Mikel Flamme in the UN Chronicle aptly describes the situation, linking poverty and trafficking:

Poverty will always remain one of the root causes for women and children to be lured into prostitution. In Asia and the Pacific alone, where roughly one third of the world’s population of 7 billion lives, nearly one fourth lives on less than one dollar per day. To get out of their poverty cycle, they are easily led into disastrous situations and taken advantage of by middlemen and agents who see them only for exploitation purposes.

It is more important to dwell upon feminization of poverty than poverty itself since women bear the greater brunt of such a disturbing phenomenon. Male migration is high in these areas, so women manage the household economy. But their source of income being agriculture, which is mostly rain-fed, does not adequately support even their subsistence levels. Off-farm livelihood practices such as carpet-making, development of handicrafts and other small businesses are unreliable because women here have little organizational skills, poor initiatives to take up production, inaccessibility of credit, little market information and a ubiquity of gender bias towards them in the market value chains.