Kunvarsingh Pusam, a Gond tribal, has paid several visits to the local police station in the last four years. But the police have little information.
CHHINDWARA: Kunvarsingh Pusam, a Gond tribal, has paid several visits to the local police station in the last four years. But the police have little information about his daughter who was 17 when she went missing in 2004.
According to Pusam, a couple acting as agents for a Delhi-based firm had promised her job. “There is no information about her since,” he says.
Pusam fears his daughter has been sold in the national capital. Last year, he even went to Delhi in search of his daughter, but returned without any luck, says Vivek Pawar of NGO Vikalp.
“One of the other girls sent for work along with Pusam’s daughter was rescued, but she is untraceable,” says Pawar.
In 2006-07, the Mandla (Madhya Pradesh) police had rescued 125 teenage girls being trafficked by local agents.
The girls were headed for Delhi and Mumbai.
Some of the rescued girls, says Naresh Vishwas, coordinator of the Mandla-based voluntary group Nirman, alleged sexual exploitation.
“Tribal-dominated districts like Mandla, Dindori and Balaghat (Madhya Pradesh) are hotspots for agents, who lure girls with a promise of jobs.” According to a study conducted by Nirman last year, more than 600 girls have gone missing in the district in the last five years.
“The root cause remains abject poverty and migration due to lack of employment,” says Mamohan Shah Bhatti, the MLA from the tribal belt of Amarwada in Chhindwara (MP). Bhatti admits that the tribal girls are being trafficked for sexual exploitation.
“Many cases do not come to light, but we do keep a vigil on outsiders in this area,” says Bhatti, a Gondwana Ganatantry Party legislator and a Gond himself.
Some of the rescued victims speak of trauma, exploitation.
A 27-year-old woman from village Bhadli was rescued from a brothel in Kolkata. She was promised the job of a domestic and taken to Delhi, but was later sold to a prostitution den.
A 23-year-old woman from village Mawai in Mandla had alleged sexual exploitation by the man in whose family she was employed in Agra.
Kavita, 18, was lucky though. In 2006, a distant acquaintance had lured her to come with him for a family ritual in Narsingpur. The girl jumped off the jeep in which she was being “abducted” after she sensed that something was amiss.
A schoolteacher had helped her reach police and then her family in Tharwa village. “We later found her abductors were involved in trafficking of girls,” her father says.
(Some names have been changed to protect identity)
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