Hindus try to send their mothers daughters and sisters to Arab states
where they fetch a higher price. If they are rejected they sell them
dime a dozen, at some places in India there are auctioned at give away
prices.

There was a documentary by CBS 60-minutes hosted by Christiana Amanpur
"15 minutes of Indias shame" In that eye opener 15 minutes run she
blew the cover and blew India out of the water...
The conclusion was:-
"THE WORSE PLACE FOR A WOMAN TO BE BORN IS *"INDIA"*"

j_flogger@hotmail.com (John Flogger) wrote in message

Police Overlooks Booming Human Trade in India : Report
Wed Aug 25, 6:45 AM ET Add World - OneWorld.net to My Yahoo!
Rahul Verma, OneWorld South Asia

NEW DELHI, Aug 25 (OneWorld) - A UNIFEM-funded report on trafficking
in India released Tuesday says 40 percent of police officials are
unaware of the growing trade in women and children, stressing the
urgent need for a nodal national agency to combat the crime.

It adds that one out of two police officers does not think it is a
"priority" issue.

Only 7. 7 percent of the police agrees that trafficking is "a high
priority issue," says the report, released by two Indian
organizations, the Institute of Social Sciences and the National Human
Rights Commission (NHRC) based in India's capital New Delhi.

"Trafficking is a modern-day slavery, a matter of global concern,"
says the coordinator of the report, Shankar Sen. "India is one of the
worst-affected countries," he says, describing the report as a "hard
empirical study of the exploitation of women and children."

The report, funded by the United Nations (news - web sites)'
organization for women, UNIFEM, says one of the main problems with
battling trafficking is the lack of awareness about it. UNIFEM's
Chandni Joshi stresses that there is very little data available on the
issue.

"We know that poverty, gender discrimination, armed conflicts and
disasters are factors that lead to trafficking," says Joshi. "But
these factors are themselves not the cause of trafficking," she says.

There is, the experts stress, a tendency to play down trafficking as a
crime. According to the police, about 60 percent of cases of women and
children being forced into trafficking go unreported.

"Trafficking in women and children is a gross violation of human
rights," says the report - Action Research on Trafficking in Women and
Children in India 2002-2003. "The commercialisation of innocent lives
is not only a serious crime but an abuse of inherent human dignity
that results in physical, social and mental damage to millions of
lives every year."

Every year, at least 11,000 women and 5,000 children in India are said
to be "missing." "Desertion is one of the main reasons for
trafficking, not coercion," says P M Nair, a senior Indian police
officer involved with the NHRC report.

Human Trafficking generates billions of dollars, and is the third
largest source of profit for organized crime after arms and drug
trafficking.

Joshi points out that while trafficking is a global phenomenon, the
source country is often a developing nation.

For instance, New Delhi, has emerged not just as a destination, but a
transit point for the trafficking of women from India's north-eastern
and eastern region, says another report by an Indian nongovernmental
organization (NGO), Shakti Vahini.

"Trafficking primarily results from uneven development leading to
large-scale migration and a widening gap between the rich and poor,"
says the NGO headquartered in Faridabad in North India. "Hunger
deaths, suicide by farmers, large number of people living below the
poverty line are the facts that glare at us," it says.

Most of the women who are victims of the trade end up in brothels in
India's financial capital, Mumbai. Women from the eastern state of
Assam are brought into the comparatively richer states of Punjab and
Haryana in the north and coerced into marriage, says Shakti Vahini.

According to one report from the eastern Indian state of Bihar,
traffickers target not just minors, but women belonging to the Dalit
community - the so-called untouchables or the lowest castes. A study
prepared by a Bihar NGO, Bhoomika Vihar, says of 173 identified cases
of women who had become victims of the trade, 85 percent were minors,
while half of them were Dalits.

Shakti Vahini stresses the need for a "multi-pronged effort" to combat
trafficking. "On one hand we have to make the institutional machinery
stronger and on the other hand urge the government to tackle uneven
development and economic disparities," it says.

The NHRC report, too - its convenors stress -- is not an end in
itself. "It gives a trumpet call for action," says Sen.

The report calls for setting up a national nodal agency to coordinate
various activities that seek to battle trafficking. It emphasizes that
"micro-studies" have to be carried out mapping the areas where women
and children come from and the regions they are taken to.

"The role of the family has been found to be critical in prevention of
trafficking. The community and family should be sensitized to issues
of gender, women's rights and child rights," it says.

It also stresses the need for changing the law, which often ends up
prosecuting the victims of the trade for being part of it.

"This is the time to act as the agenda has been set," the report says.
"It is better late than never."