"We will have another meeting next week in India. We are telling
each other what we can do. This month, we are going to see that specific
solutions come into being."
India is working to curb trafficking of women, children - minister
India is
working to find ways to curb the widespread trafficking of women and
children in the country, including those from neighbouring Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan, said Maneka Gandhi, India's minister for women and children.
South
Asia, with India at its centre, is the fastest-growing and
second-largest region for human trafficking in the world, after East
Asia, according to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime.
Speaking
at a conference on child adoption in India's northeastern state of
Meghalaya, Gandhi told delegates that the government was in the process
of putting in place a series of policies to prevent human trafficking.
"We
have discussed this issue in the cabinet. We had called a meeting with
these countries last month in which all NGOs working on this and others
in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh came," she said on Monday.
"We
will have another meeting next week in India. We are telling each other
what we can do. This month, we are going to see that specific solutions
come into being."
According to the National
Crime Records Bureau, there were 5,466 cases of human trafficking
registered in 2014, an increase of 90 percent over the past five years.
Activists
say this is a gross under-estimation of the scale of the problem, as
much of the illicit organised crime is underground.
They
claim thousands of people - largely poor, rural women and children -
are lured to India's towns and cities each year by traffickers who
promise good jobs but sell them into domestic work or sex work or to
industries such as textile workshops.
In many cases, they are not paid or are held in debt bondage. Some go missing, and their families cannot trace them.
Gandhi
said India's remote northeastern states, which include Assam, Sikkim,
Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, were a key source area for
trafficking and called for the appointment of a special female police
officer in each village to keep a check on crimes against women and
children.
"There is an enormous amount of
trafficking of children going on from the northeast. We find them in
Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and many going to Malaysia and Thailand. It is not
fair," she said.
"The job of special
women police is to be vigilant in the village and see that children do
not go missing, women are not beaten by husbands, girls are sent to
school."
A comprehensive new anti-trafficking
law is also being drafted, say government officials. This will not only
unify several existing laws, but also raise penalties for offenders and
provide victims with rehabilitation and compensation.
The
law, which is expected to be ready by the end of the year, will also
provide for the establishment of a central investigative
anti-trafficking agency to coordinate and work between states and
special courts to hear such cases.
إرسال تعليق