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Anti-trafficking activists are pitching for a legislation to regulate placement agencies in Assam, given the rise in trafficking of children from the state to work as domestic helps in the metros. According to NGOs working against child trafficking, the need for such a law is now being felt more than ever as Assam has become an important source area in the country for trafficking children for domestic labour in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Digambar Narzary, chairperson of Nedan Foundation, a Kokrajhar-based anti-trafficking NGO, said such a law was very much required in Assam, and Dispur should take a cue from Chhattisgarh, which was the first state in the country to enact a legislation last year to rein in private placement agencies involved in the trafficking of women and children to metros. Speaking to The Telegraph on the sidelines of the Fourth Anti-Trafficking in Persons Conclave held here recently, Narzary said many districts in Assam, such as Kokrajhar, Baksa, Chirang and Sonitpur, had become the hotbed of trafficking. Echoing Narzary, Ravi Kant, president of the NGO Shakti Vahini, said a Chhattisgarh-like legislation was required in Assam to make it mandatory for placement agencies and their agents operating in the state to get registered with the government to ensure better monitoring of these agencies. Kant said Jharkhand chief minister Raghubar Das had announced during the conclave that his government would promulgate a law to regulate placement agencies to check human trafficking. "The Assam government should also bring such an act as soon as possible," he added. Kant, who has been behind the rescue of several children who were forced to work as domestic helps in Delhi in subhuman conditions, said the absence of such an act in Assam made it difficult to ascertain the exact number of placement agencies and their agents operating in the state. Over the years, Assam has become a source area for trafficking of children who are forced to work as domestic helps, are often exploited, abused, even pushed into the flesh trade or simply remain untraced. Nobel laureate and child rights crusader Kailash Satyarthi, during his visit to Assam in December 2012, had acknowledge the fact that the state had emerged as one of the biggest source areas, transit route and destination for trafficking of children. "It is the choicest place for child traffickers to thrive on account of frequent natural calamities, insurgency, acute poverty, illiteracy, ignorance of the masses and extremely weak law enforcement," the founder of Bachpan Bachao Andolan had said. Satyarthi had also expressed concern over the low conviction rate in human trafficking cases in Assam and had underscored the need to clamp down on dubious placement agencies, which source children from the state to employ them as domestic helps. These kids often end up being physically abused and sexually exploited. NGOs involved in rescuing trafficked children said the owners of placement agencies keep the children in confinement in unhygienic conditions for days and prevent them from communicating with relatives back home. There is a vicious network of human traffickers who bring children mostly belonging to poverty-stricken and remote regions of Assam, Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar to the metros, they added.
Keywords
Trafficking, conclave, Assam, child labour, forced migration, legal reform. sexual exploitation
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