WUNRN
INDIA - YOUNG GIRLS FACE TRAFFICKING
AS LACK
OF RAIN DRIVES WORSENING RURAL
POVERTY
05 May 2010
A
sex worker watches celebrations of the Raksha Bandhan festival in a red light
area of Mumbai in August 2009. Increasingly dry weather is hurting farmers in
Northeast India, driving an increase in trafficking of young rural girls to
city brothels. REUTERS/Punit Paranjpe
By
Teresa Rehman
NALBARI
DISTRICT, India (AlertNet) - The rescue of 17-year-old Nitumoni (name changed)
from a brothel in Shillong city recently points to a new danger as climate
change takes hold in Northeast India - trafficking of vulnerable women.
Nitumoni's
widowed mother, from Madhupur village, used to work as a daily wage labourer at
rice fields in her village, near the Bhutan border.
But
as groundwater dries up in the region and rains fall short, farmers are giving
up rice production, leaving families like Nitumoni's without work and
struggling to make ends meet.
So
when a distant relative offered to take Nitumoni to Shillong, the capital of
neighboring Meghalaya state, to work as a domestic helper, her impoverished
family agreed. But the girl instead ended up in a brothel, before being rescued
recently by police.
This
has raised new worries about the dangers facing young girls as their already poor
families struggle to cope with added burdens brought on by climate change.
"It
dawned on me that climate change had much broader implications than it appears.
Issues like human trafficking come to the limelight only when such an incident
takes place. Otherwise, nobody wants to talk about it," said Prithibhusan
Deka, president of Gramya Vikas Mancha, a non-profit local development
organization.
Many
young girls sent from poor homes to find work end up trafficked to India as
prostitutes or poorly paid factory workers, she said.
The
organization is now working to fight the problem, which has been growing in
remote villages badly hit by erratic rainfall and near-drought situations, she
said.
GIRLS SENT TO CITY AS FARM INCOMES FALL
"This
raises questions about human trafficking in the name of searching for alternate
means of livelihood. We are conducting a baseline survey of young women, mostly
climate refugees who are trafficked and forced into sex work in big cities in
India. It is very difficult to get accurate statistics as nobody wants to talk
about it. But we know that there are middlemen who are operating in these
areas," Deka said.
In
a growing number of villages in Assam, groundwater levels are very low and
farmers are dependent on natural rainfall or dongs, traditional water
channels that are the main source of irrigation and drinking water.
The
age-old water management system is particularly important to the most thirsty
villages in the area.
Dongs
are akin to small dams built on a river, with water diverted through canals to
fields and backyard ponds. But gradually even the dongs are now drying up.
Due
to rampant deforestation in the foothills of Bhutan, heavy rains during the
monsoons now carry rocks, soil and silt that block the dongs, said Ramani
Thakuria, a senior agronomist at Assam Agricultural University. And in winter,
the systems increasingly run completely dry, particularly as rainfall becomes
more erratic.
As
a result, farmers engaged in water-intensive rice cultivation have been
severely affected, with many now moving to cities in search of new work or
sending family members there to supplement falling incomes on the farm.
Nitumoni,
her family's oldest child, was sent to the city to help support her mother and
younger siblings, according to police who raided a brothel, rescuing a number
of young girls.
Alarmed
by the growing poverty-driven trafficking problem, Deka's organization is now
working to introduce technology to help farmers earn more income at home.
Under
a "rice intensification" effort, families in 100 villages in Nalbari
and Baksa districts in Assam are getting training in how to grow rice with much
less water and commercial fertilizer. The system, developed in the 1980s in
Madagascar, has been successfully used in other parts of India.
"Water
shortage and erratic rainfall is a global phenomenon due to climate change and
we expect this to continue. We will have to improvise our agricultural methods
accordingly to cope with the vagaries of nature," said Ramani Kanta Sarma
of Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Nidhi, an Indian development NGO that gives training
on rice intensification techniques.
The
organization, which began introducing the system in Assam two years ago, plans
to have trained farmers throughout the state within three years, Sarma said.
This
new technology has produced an enthusiastic response from farmers in some of
the state's poorest and most remote districts.
"As
community water resources were drying up, many of my fellow farmers were
contemplating giving up rice cultivation. But we are looking forward to this
new technology now," said Basistha Talukdar, one Nalbari district farmer.
"We
have to arrange for our own water," added Ananta Kalita, a young farmer
from Teteliguri village, near the Bhutan border. "There is no system to
procure water from far-off places. We will have to make the best of what we
have."
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