Date:21/02/2007 URL:

http://www.thehindu.com/2007/02/21/stories/2007022103980500.htm
Andhra Pradesh - Nalgonda

28 girls rescued from brothels
Staff Reporter

#Police raid den in Maharashtra
#Traffickers lure girls on the pretext of offering jobs
#Officials to restore the victims to their parents

NALGONDA: A police team led by Suryapet Circle Inspector M. Tirupathanna rescued 35 girls from the brothels of Chandrapur in Maharashtra after arresting 15 traffickers, including a mother-son duo, in a raid conducted on Monday.
Of the rescued girls, 28 are from the State, six are from Maharashtra and one is from Karnataka.
The girls belong to Warangal and Khammam (seven members each), Hyderabad (five), Nalgonda (four) and Adilabad, Mahaboobnagar, Krishna, Guntur and Nellore (one each), Superintendent of Police Vijay Kumar said in a press release here on Tuesday.
The traffickers allegedly forced them into flesh trade after luring them with jobs.
Kingpins — Raninga Venkatesh and his mother Sundaramma alias Somakka of Nakrekal and K. Chandrakala of Kamareddigudem of Tripuraram mandal — were among the 15 persons arrested on the charge of trafficking girls.
Accused
While seven accused persons hail from Warangal district, two are from Hyderabad, one each from Khammam, Guntur and Maharashtra.
The police produced the victims and the accused persons before a local court. "The girls will be handed over to officials of the Child Welfare Department who will restore them to their parents," police sources said.
Mr. Kumar appreciated Chandrapur Collector Sanjay Jaiswal for helping the State police in carrying out the operation.
© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu

It's not the activity of rascals that destroys our society but inactivity of good people.
Shiv Khera

Date:14/02/2007

URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/02/14/stories/2007021421060300.htm

Police to crack down on human traffickers
Special Correspondent
*Three-day 79th All-India Women's Conference inaugurated
*It is celebrating the 80th foundation day of its Hyderabad branch
*Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTU) to be increased to eight

ALL EARS: Woman leaders from across the country participating at the All India Women's Conference in the city on Tuesday. — PHOTO: P.V. SIVAKUMAR

HYDERABAD: The police will use the Andhra Pradesh Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Bootleggers, Dacoits, Drug Offenders, Goondas Act, 1986 and Andhra Pradesh Control of Organised Crime Act to bring human traffickers to book, said Director-General of Police M.A. Basith.
He was speaking after Governor Rameshwar Thakur inaugurated a three-day 79th All-India Women's Conference (AIWC) here on Tuesday.
Mr. Basith said they were working in coordination with police in other States, apart from planning to augment the number of Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTU) from the present three to eight.
Raids by the State police in Bhiwandi and Yavatmal areas of Maharashtra had led to arrest of 136 offenders and release of 157 victims, including 26 minors, last month.
The Governor gave away lifetime achievement awards to Gool Chenoy, Gyan Astana, Sudha Ranganathan, Hemachandra and Anees Mahmood. He also released a souvenir.
A blot on society
Mr. Rameshwar Thakur said human trafficking was a blot on society and an insult to women that deserved to be condemned. He urged law enforcement agencies to go all-out to stamp out the menace, blaming the `inferior' status of women in education, socio-economic and political life for violence against them.
AIWC is celebrating the 80th foundation day of its Hyderabad branch.

It's not the activity of rascals that destroys our society but inactivity of good people.
Shiv Khera

Hyderabad
Monday, February 12, 2007
Rescued girls grab chance to put dark days behind


Seventeen-year-old Anju* wanted to be a teacher, but these hopes were crushed when her brother sold her to a brothel in Hyderabad two years ago. Her luck changed when she was rescued in a recent operation by the Crime Investigation Department and sent to a rescue home in the old city. Now she is learning carpentry and is once again able to dream of a future. Recalling her darkest days, Anju says, “The madam forced me into the trade. Initially I protested and they gave me no food and water for days. I was beaten round the clock and then I had no other option than to accept what she said,” she added.Anju is one of 156 girls from the State who were rescued in a series of operations around the country by the CID in the past few months. Of this number, 26 were minors. Many of girls are from Kurnool, Guntur, Krishna, Nalgonda, Nizamabad, Ranga Reddy and Adilabad districts.
The stories of torture endured by these young girls are chilling. Police say that many of the brothels injected them with hormones to induce artificial growth. Sex traffickers also gave some of them oestrogen injections to speed up puberty. Rescued girls told the police how cockroaches packed in a cloth would be tied to their stomachs if they refused to entertain customers. In some cases the victims were even locked in room with boxes containing snakes. Though some were sold by their closest relatives, others were deceived in the name of jobs, marriage, film roles, modelling and love.
After they are freed from the brothels, the girls are sent to government rescue homes or homes run by NGOs, says Mahesh Bhagawat, SP of the CID. “After that, the rehabilitation and reintegration work is taken up by the Women and Child Welfare Department,” he says. There are about 12 state run homes, but most of these are already crowded so minors are often sent to rescue homes run by NGOs. Here they learn vocational skills and get counselling. Sometimes, the NGOs help them get married too.
It is one of these homes that Santoo*, who was rescued from a brothel in Maharasthra, ended up. She recollects the first day she stepped into the rescue home two weeks ago, “Everything was new to me. My life was totally different.” The 21-year-old from Khammam said that she was working in a telephone booth when she was promised a good job in Hyderabad. But when she boarded the train, she was drugged and woke up to find herself in Maharashtra. Today, she is optimistic. “I have not given up yet. I am learning computers and I want to work with a good company as a computer professional,” she says.
Some of the rescued girls are on a mission to save others. Zaira*, at 20 is outspoken. “I want the world to know what happened to me. I want to dedicate my life to rescuing other girls. I can never forget the trauma I faced. I don’t want this to happen to others,” she says. Zaira like Santoo, was promised a good job. “I eloped with a guy when I was 16 but the marriage fell apart and I worked in a shop. A man promised me a job in Hyderabad, but he took me to Goa instead and sold me to a brothel.”
A lot of girls like Zaira end up working at their rescue homes. Some lucky ones go on to find work or get married. Sadly, there are a few who fall through the cracks and return to the flesh trade. Though the State government has a policy of rehabilitating these women, long-term implementation is a problem. After a certain point the girls must fend for themselves. If like Anju and Santoo, they embrace the chance to learn new skills, there is hope for a brighter future.
*names changed

It's not the activity of rascals that destroys our society but inactivity of good people.
Shiv Khera

Andhra’s girls vanish, many to Maharashtra’s brothels
Karn Kowshik
Posted online: Thursday, February 08, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST
HYDERABAD, FEBRUARY 7

Sarla was 10 when she left her house in Andhra Pradesh’s Khammam district. Her elder sister Lakshmi took her by train to Maharashtra, where she was passed on to another girl, who promised to employ her as a domestic help.
Instead, she was taken to a brothel, and sold to the ‘madam’ for Rs 2,000.
She spent the next few years changing hands, going from one owner to another. Her last ‘employer’ was Mrs. Trivedi. “We used to live with her. She would take us to picnics with men who we didn’t know. This happened very often. We were not given any money, but instead given food and clothes,” says Sarla.
She is now 15. And back.
That’s not a usual story in a state where over half of the missing children are never traced. An estimated 3,497 children, a majority of them girls, went missing last year and only 1,585 were recovered.
Sarla (name changed) was fortunate. She was rescued from Vani in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal by a team of Mumbai police. She was put up at a shelter in Mumbai and discovered by an Andhra police officer who visited the home to work out a system of sharing information with his Mumbai counterparts.
The police brought her back to Khammam, cracked down on the trafficking ring, arrested five women who ran it and rescued 37 girls who took the same route. As many as 10 of them are still minors.
Five years after going missing, cases of kidnapping and trafficking were registered for Sarla.
It’s the same story for Lekha, 16. She, too, was promised a job in Maharashtra and ended up in a Vani brothel. Lekha (name changed) has been rescued and is now at a counselling centre in Hyderabad, waiting for her HIV test results. In her Khammam village, no case was registered when she disappeared.
R K Meena, SP, Khammam, says parents are reluctant to register cases in rural Andhra, because of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy. “There is also a stigma associated with a missing girl. They know that if a case is filed, then police will come asking questions, and they do not want this,” he says.
Officials working against human trafficking say that Andhra Pradesh is a major supplier of girls for prostitution across the country.
Padma, recently arrested by Khammam police in Vani, Maharashtra says: “There are a lot of girls from AP in Vani.” While the police allege that she herself dealt in minor girls, she refutes it. “We too were forced into this business¿ why will we sell minors? Yes, we do trade in other girls. The other brothels around us do get children from AP. But it’s not our fault. It’s their own parents and siblings who come to sell them,” she says.
SP of the Women’s Protection cell in Hyderabad, Mahesh Bhagwat, says that many red-light areas prefer girls from AP.
In Andhra Pradesh, records show that the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secundrabad have the highest number of missing children in the state. In 2006, 1,031 of the 3,497 missing children were from here, and another 766 from neighbouring Cyberabad. Meena says that as labourers from rural areas migrate to the cty in search of jobs, many of their children are left unattended. Most of those missing are, in fact, from the lower strata of society.
Officials say that problem is worst in Khammam, Warangal, Adilabad as well as the coastal East and West Godawari districts. As in the recent case where 37 girls were recovered in Maharashtra, most of the minors that go missing are not reported in the state.
“In AP, the problem of missing children is compounded by factors like illiteracy. Social systems like the Devadasi system also endorse prostitution, making the police’s job harder,” says Union Women and Child Development minister (and Khammam MP) Renuka Choudhary. According to Choudhary, almost 40 per cent of trafficking originates in AP. Police officials say that there has been no survey to gauge how much trafficking originates from AP, but they place the figure “around 25-30 %.”
While Childline Hyderabad’s Isidore Phillips agrees that a large number of children that go missing from AP are trafficked, he says, “It’s not just trafficking for prostitution. There is also trafficking for labour, which is rampant. And while attaching the label of trafficking, we should not lose out on kidnapping for ransom.”
Phillips, who deals with a large number of missing children in Hyderabad, says, “There is a vast gap between reported and unreported cases. The police are reluctant to register FIRs for missing children. The Juvenile Justice act says that every police station must have a Special Juvenile police Unit and a Child Welfare Officer. This is non-existent.”
The state has no special team to tackle the problem of missing children. “We have no special team to find missing people,” says M. Ratan, Addl. Director General, CID (which deals with missing people).
“We can’t have a special unit for every different activity. It is the job of the local police and the SP of the district to find missing people,” he says.
Every fortnight, the CID compiles a list of missing people, along with photographs, and circulates it to all police stations as well as neighbouring states. T Krishna Prasad, who as Additional Director of the AP Police Academy trained three new Anti-Human Trafficking Units, says, “From the searching point of view, there is an issue. Something is missing¿ everyone is concentrating on sending, not on searching. We send pictures to districts, but nothing happens after that. There is no systematic approach to search for missing people. It’s not a job that police can do effectively. We should possibly employ some NGO for the job along with incentives.”
Other than trafficking for labour and prostitution, children from AP are also forced into begging or kidnapping. Though there have been cases of children being sent to the Gulf as child camel-jockeys, officials say such cases are difficult to track down, as parents are involved.

It's not the activity of rascals that destroys our society but inactivity of good people.
Shiv Khera

Date:07/02/2007
URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/02/07/stories/2007020715670300.htm
Andhra Pradesh -
Nalgonda Tribal couple wants back baby `sold' for Rs. 5,000

Staff Reporter
NALGONDA: Dakhrawath Saida, a tribal of Guntibava thanda in Devarakonda mandal, wants his daughter back from the person to whom he has allegedly sold her. But the person, who has `adopted' the 20-day-old baby, is refusing to give her back.
"They took away my daughter after giving me Rs.5,000 recently. They gave me their phone number saying that we could visit her whenever we wanted. But the person, who receives my calls, says that we can't get her back," Saida said. "We don't want the money but we want our baby back," Poori, Saida's wife, said.
A tribal of a nearby `thanda' has allegedly prompted the couple to give away the newborn baby. It is said that a person from Hyderabad is instrumental in the "purchase" of the baby. Saida also said that the middleman had allegedly taken Rs.1, 000 from him for arranging the deal.
Case registered
Unable to bear the agony, the tribal couple approached the police with the help of ICDS officials. "Poverty had led us to give away the baby. We handed over the baby at Mallepally with the help of our relative. Now I realise that they have deceived me," Saida said.
Kanakadurga of the ICDS contacted the person who had allegedly taken away the baby girl. "Initially, he told me that the girl died but later he changed his stand when I told him that I was calling from the police station," the official said. Sub-Inspector K. Srinvas told The Hindu that a case was filed on the basis of a complaint filed by the couple. He said that investigation was on to find out the whereabouts of the baby.
© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu

It's not the activity of rascals that destroys our society but inactivity of good people.
Shiv Khera