Lid blown off girl trafficking racket

A STAFF REPORTER
Guwahati, May 22: The disappearance of a teenaged girl from Keyajeni village in Kamrup district in 1999 has blown the lid off a girl trafficking racket running from Assam to the heartland.
When Shakti Vahini, a Delhi-based NGO, came down to Kamrup recently to investigate the disappearance of Kanika Das, a teenager from the village, it found that 20 more girls were missing from the same area. The common thread linking these cases was that they had supposedly ended up in Haryana’s Rewari district.
The members of the NGO also found that at least two girls, Kanika and another named Pranita Das, were lured with jobs by Deepa Das of Keyajeni village. Deepa had returned to the village in 2001 and being pestered by Kanika’s parents for news of their child, had told them that their daughter was in Haryana, happily married.
She even gave Kanika’s family her contact number. But when nobody answered the telephone, Deepa told them that Kanika had died at childbirth.
Kanika’s desperate mother, who worked as domestic help in the house of the personal assistant to Union minister Santosh Gangwar, then threatened to go to the police. Her employer then got in touch with the NGO, which in turn tipped off theHaryana police.
A couple of months ago, a constable from the Haryana force along with two members of the NGO, came down on a fact-finding mission and stumbled on the racket.
Union minister of state for water resources Bijoya Chakravarti also took up the matter with the Delhi police. “The matter was also brought to the notice of deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani in August 2001,” said Kamal Kumar Pandey, secretary of the NGO.
The Telegraph, Calcutta, India
Friday, May 23, 2003