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TopStatistical Background Of The Problem
‘2016 Trafficking in Persons Report’ prepared by US Department of State Diplomacy in Action (2016) has placed India on the Tier-2 Watch List for human trafficking. According to this report, India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women and children trafficked. Human trafficking earns profits of roughly $150 billion a year for traffickers, according to the International Labour Organization (Human Rights First, 2017). In 2015, a total of 6877 cases of human trafficking cases were registered in India. Out of these, 21.7% cases were reported from Assam, the absolute number being 1494 cases (NCRB, 2016). It was 267% increase than the previous year in the state.
The purposes of human trafficking in India are unique. The purposes include not only forced prostitution but also force marriage, domestic labour, bonded labour, agriculture labour, industrial labour, entertainment, begging, adoption, drug smuggling, drug peddling and organ transplants. In recent reports by newspapers (Basu, 2017) the fair skinned Nepali origin women are also operated upon to extract part of their body skin in order to use it in cosmetic surgery of rich clients. For the girls from North-eastern India origin, it is a new concern as the Mongoloid origin girls from this region are similar to the Nepalese in terms of skin colour.
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in India started to collect data on human trafficking under section 370 and 370A of Indian Penal Code (IPC), which deals exclusively with human trafficking cases for the first time in 2014. Prior to this, trafficking was perceived to be a gender biased crime in the sense of victim concerned and so the data was incorporated under the broad head of crimes against women (Table 1).