In March 2021, at Basirhat area of North 24-Parganas district in West Bengal, two men in their mid-20s who had been stalking two girl students of class 9 since January, trying to allure them with the prospect of happy marriage, forced the two minors into a car and took them to Bharuch in Gujarat, where they sold them to a brothel.
It took Ruksana Khatun and Preeti Das (names changed) two months and many failed attempts to contact family amid daily torture, to finally manage a phone to call home. Intimated by a Basirhat-based NGO, the Gujarat police tracked down the number, zeroed in on the brothel and rescued them. Due to the Covid lockdown, the young men who brought them to Gujarat were stranded in Bharuch, and with information from the brothel owner, the police arrested the duo. A police team from Basirhat brought back Khatun, Das and the two accused. But, to the horror of the two survivors, both the accused got bail from a court in January 2021, despite being booked under provisions of the POCSO Act and the police having filed a charge-sheet on time.
“The biggest flaw in the investigation in our case is that none of the Gujarat residents who bought us and exploited us sexually and physically were arrested. This leaves the probe incomplete and weakens the case against local traffickers,” Khatun says. With the help of a local anti-trafficking organisation, both of them have returned to school; this year, both passed their secondary exam in the first division.
According to Bikash Das of Teghoria Institute for Social Movement, the NGO that helped the survivors in pursuing the case and getting rehabilitated in their families and neighbourhoods, the new anti-trafficking bill that the Centre plans to introduce in the current monsoon session of Parliament should fill in the gaps that hamper probes into cases of inter-state trafficking, for the new bill proposes investigation by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
“Unless law enforcers can strike at both the source and destination areas, the racket will not weaken. The NIA can come handy in giving justice to the victims of inter-state trafficking,” says Das.
Like him, other anti-trafficking activists rest their hope on the provisions of the bill, formally called the Trafficking in Persons (Prevention, Care and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2021. It was passed in the Lok Sabha in its previous avatar in 2018 but was never placed before the Rajya Sabha after being roundly criticised.
The new law appears to be more acceptable to activists. Highlighting its positive aspects, Pompi Banerjee, a psychologist and activist associated with Calcutta-based NGO Sanjog, says, “The new Bill has built on the criticism that the ministry of women and child development received on the 2018 Bill. For the first time, it attempts to provide a definition of rehabilitation with a focus on mental health and psychological recovery of trafficking survivors. It upholds their right to rehabilitation and compensation independent of criminal proceedings.”
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Yet many aspects of the Bill have made activists and trafficking survivors wary of it—a reason why it has not received wholehearted approbation from them, even though it proposes stringent penal measures, including the death penalty, to trafficking convicts. “We welcome the proposal of investigation by NIA but the Bill neither mentions any fund for inter-state probes nor which agency is responsible for drafting the probe reports. Without specifying these, investigation into inter-state rackets will suffer,” says a leader of Utthan, a collective of trafficking survivors. She adds that they are upset as the Bill has also not met the demand that members of survivor collectives be made part of the district-level mechanism against trafficking, from prevention and rescue to rehabilitation.
The Indian Leadership Forum Against Trafficking, a forum of survivors spread across West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, says the draft bill “marks a significant departure” from the previous one and had “undoubtedly made attempts to be a little more victim-centric”. The forum, however, points out that while necessary measures in ensuring care, dignity, and rehabilitation has been mentioned, the bill does not fix accountability on any one body to ensure its provisions are met. “There is no mention of a dedicated rehabilitation fund—necessary for relief, rehabilitation, compensation, and funds for inter- and intra-state investigations,” the forum wrote in its recommendations sent to the ministry.
Most activists also worry that the law makes no attempt to strengthen the existing anti-human trafficking units (AHTU) of different district police and about how the AHTU and the NIA would coordinate inter-state probes. Mentioning that survivors have noticed “a stark difference between AHTUs and over-burdened police stations in the manner of handling these cases, the forum adds, “AHTUs dedicated to trafficking cases, with sensitised police officers, NGOs and survivors, are crucial in ensuring higher conviction rates and treatment of victims with care and dignity. Therefore, a law that would set out the procedures with clarity on what will be taken up by which body is essential.” At present, it is not mandatory for the police to hand over all cases of human trafficking to AHTUs.
According to N. Rammohan, an anti-trafficking activist from Andhra Pradesh, police stations lack the expertise, time and resources to take preventive measures and track the network of traffickers. “The rising debt bondage of sex workers puts their children at risk of forced prostitution. Unless the AHTUs are empowered to break the nexus between money lenders, pimps and brothel owners, the entry of sex workers’ children into the trade, especially young women between 18 and 21, will seem consensual,” Rammohan says.
Anti-trafficking researcher Roop Sen points out that the Bill is silent on the intelligence gathering required for prevention in a crime that requires “strategies similar to those used against drug cartels” to tackle. “Given that human trafficking is an organised crime, this legislation says nothing about gathering intelligence …and any strategic investigation for identifiying traffickers, buyers and users of trafficked persons for forced labour and/or sexual exploitation,” he adds. Sen suggests that the NIA should be given the task.
Members of Tafteesh, an anti-trafficking consortium, say that one positive of the new bill is that it proposes a common law to address all human trafficking—from sexual exploitation, forced labour and slavery to trafficking of human organs—and it should help remove “prejudice towards sex work as compared to other forms of trafficking as well as arbitrary inconsistencies between different legislations targeting trafficking.”
However, Tamil Nadu-based anti-trafficking activist Kandaswamy Krishnan says that the Bill needed to use ‘gender-neutral language’ to ensure all genders had access to its benefits. “Human trafficking is not restricted to women, children and transgenders. Males are victims of labour trafficking too,” Krishnan says. He adds that the definition of “debt bondage” requires to be expanded to include “any of lineal ascendants or descendants” of the debtor whose services have been pledged. “A debtor could also pledge his/her children/ grandchildren,” he says.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Under The Net")
By Snigdhendu Bhattacharya in Calcutta
