Foreign call girls looking to make quick bucks are increasingly turning towards Indian shores and their services are openly advertised in newspapers and on the internet.
Last week’s arrest of two foreign call girls in Mumbai merely scratched the surface of what is now a nation-wide trend.
Foreign call girls looking to make quick bucks are increasingly turning towards Indian shores and their services are openly advertised in newspapers and on the internet.
Tourist visas in hand, the women from the ex-Soviet states, parts of eastern Europe and South-east Asia flock to Indian metros, lending a new colour to the country’s flesh trade.
If airfares are low profits are high, well-heeled Indians are ready to pay handsome amounts to foreign hustlers.
Up on their itineraries are cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi, all of which have a good number of high-fliers, say pimps and police officers across India.
Chennai’s deputy commissioner G Dharmaraj (Crime Branch) says networks supplying foreign girls are fast setting up bases there. “Many operate through the internet as escort services and none have local contact details, as the phone numbers are those of pimps in other cities,” he told DNA.
The trade flourishes but arrests have been few and far between. The anti-vice squad of the Chennai police arrested a Siberian woman who was entertaining men at a house in Purusaiwakkam in the heart of the city last September.
The 31-year-old had been brought by a woman pimp famous for her “innovations” in the flesh trade in Chennai. She had come to India in May 2007 and ‘worked’ in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore before reaching Tamil Nadu.
Promises ‘Angela’ on her website
www.bangaloreescorts.net: “We bring you elite and high class escort girls for offering true Girl Friend Experience. We offer timely and confidential service for high calibre gentlemen and businessmen.”
Adds another site, bangaloreescortservices.com: “Our girls are between 18-34 years of age and come in all shapes and sizes from average to very busty, singles or duos.”
Police complain it is difficult to track foreign call girls since they come on tourist visas.
“Unless we get a tip-off, it’s tough to track them,” says KN Jeetendranath, assistant commissioner of police heading the women and narcotics squad in Bangalore.
“We were tipped off about a call girl from Morocco last January. But we couldn’t catch her red-handed and hence had to let her go,” he adds.
The Delhi police arrested some 12 foreign girls in four incidents last year, the latest being in November. But their own estimates in 2005 spoke of at least 500 foreigners being involved in the trade.
What makes it tougher to catch them, says a source in the southern IT hub of Hyderabad, is that they have “connections with highly placed officials.”
The police there arrested and deported three girls of Indonesian and Korean origins from a posh hotel in August 2007, blowing the lid off a major racket.
They were part of an international cartel that supplied women to clients who travelled a lot and demanded services wherever they moved.
At least five groups operate in Hyderabad, particularly during international conferences, says an officer, adding: “The foreign girls are protected by private guards who shadow them from the moment they land here.”
Ahmedabad is another important port of call for them especially during festivals. Last year the police in the Gujarat capital arrested a teenage girl from Uzbekistan. “We got a tip-off about a brothel in a posh locality of the city and raided it” an officer says. She came to the city from Mumbai through Daman for 15 days with the help of a local brothel operator but was arrested within a week.
Since the foreign hustlers charge more than the local ones, their clientele usually comprises high net-worth individuals.
Uzbek girls are said to charge around Rs 5000 to Rs 15000 for three to four hours in Ahmedabad.
“Usually customers demand new faces and are ready to spend large amounts on foreign girls,” informs a member of Sakhi Jyot Sangathan, an NGO working with sex workers in Ahmedabad.
Bangalore websites quote anything between Rs10,000 and Rs1 lakh, exclusive of the girls’ travel costs, depending on duration and class of service.
Senior police officials in New Delhi say these women are brought to India and paid up to Rs50,000-Rs75,000 per month by the middlemen. The women are provided good accommodation in posh south Delhi colonies, an officer said, adding that most of them serve their clients in major city hotels or farmhouses.
In Kolkata however, foreign prostitutes are usually of Nepali and Bangladeshi origin, the odd Uzbek or Ukrainian girl conducting her business discreetly.
With inputs from
Gyan Varma (New Delhi),
Arun Ram (Chennai),
Roxy Gagdekar (Ahmedabad),
Bhargavi Kerur (Bangalore) and Sumanta Ray Chaudhury (Kolkata)
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