Poverty and Conflict Fuels Human Trafficking in the North Eastern States

July 14, 2010 10:09 am

Abstracted from AIDS India: North East: AIDS, HIV and misery co-exist, 2006

Images of guns, drugs and rebels have long defined India’s troubled North-east. A study carried out by the Nedan Foundation across eight states in this resource-rich, infrastructure-poor, conflict-scarred region highlights a new worry: the rising tide of human trafficking mostly women and girls and its potential for hastening the spread of HIV/AIDS.

At the 25 relief camps of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kokrajhar in Bodoland Territorial Council, Assam nearly 200,000 people are live without proper food. Kokrajhar is one of several hot spots in conflict-ridden North-east India. Since the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced in the region by regular clashes between various militant and tribal groups. Traffickers carry out recruitment drives here making false promises of jobs as domestic help in big cities.

It was noted that more than 100 young women had gone missing from the camps over the past two years. Regional analysts fear that such “missing girls” may have been sold into sexual slavery or “temporarily married” ~ often a euphemism for prostitution.

The fear is that many such girls are extremely susceptible to HIV/AIDS and that many have already been infected.

Most of the girls are from broken families, having lost one or both parents in the region’s protracted ethnic con-flicts. Almost all had dropped out of school and faced a bleak future, the foundation discovered.

It is hoped that the study’s key findings, such as these from the eight states, will spur the Indian government, as well as NGOs, to come forward with initiatives to reduce the level of human trafficking in the region and thereby lessen the spread of HIV/AIDS in this troubled part of the country.

(This is a report by Plusnews, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.)