About 20,000 women trafficked to India have been repatriated through the legal process in the last ten years, as per the official figure.
However, there is no solid information on the number of women and children trafficked and those who are still trapped in the country.
The National Women Lawyers Association and Rights Jessore, two non-governmental organizations working to bring trafficked women back to India, said yesterday there were still more than 50 women in government and private safehouses in the country after they were detained by the country’s police. Efforts are being made to bring them back with the help of the governments of Bangladesh and India.
UNI’ s analysis of 250 cases of trafficking in women from Bangladesh to India shows that 90 per cent of the victims are from low-income families. And 95 per cent were taken to India out of greed for a good job. They were later sold to human trafficking rings.
Of the 250 cases analyzed, 154 were aged. Of these, 61 are adolescents, 48 are between 19 and 25 years of age and 31 are between 28 and 35 years of age. The other 4 are older than that.
The issue of trafficking in women has come to the fore again after a video of a Bangladeshi girl being brutally tortured went viral in India late last month. Indian police arrested six people in the incident, including Rifadul Islam alias Tiktak Hridoy, a resident of Dhaka’s Maghbazar.
Meanwhile, after the incident, police and RAB arrested 12 people from two gangs on charges of being involved in trafficking in women. Police and RAB have claimed that these two gangs alone have trafficked about 2,000 women to India in five years.
