Over the top

by Ruchika Rai

I couldn’t help but compare him to the character played by Tim Roth in the popular American sitcom Lie to me – a professional lie-detection expert, who scans each and every micro-expression of the accused to reach the truth. Janak Chand, a 40 year old human trafficking inspector, who’s been in the field identifying and arresting (with the help of the local police) traffic victims and perpetrators for over 10 years now, is a man of few facial expressions. ‘In my job, it helps to pull a straight face. Nobody should know what I’m up to,’ explains Chand, who’s never had any formal training as a detective. He recently reported his 120th case of human trafficking to the local police, and has worked on various international and government anti-trafficking programs. Chand is currently working on the Ujjawala scheme of the government of India.

There are several Indian and Nepalese NGOs working towards the prevention of human trafficking, as well as rescue and rehabilitation of victims at the Indo-Nepalese border. They hire locals from the area’s villages to keep an eye on people crossing the border. These self-trained human trafficking inspectors, around 20 of them at the Terai border, have contributed substantially towards curbing human trafficking in the area. Most of them fall in the age group of 20-40 years; few of them attended college.

Their day starts early in the morning as the border gates open from 0600 -0700 hrs, and later around 1200hrs, as well as 1700 hrs. Meera Samant, a human trafficking inspector and a mother of two, who lives alone in Gadda Chowki (Nepal) as her husband serves the Nepal army, finishes her household chores and drops her children to school before she starts her work at the check post at 1100 hrs. ‘I have a female and two male colleagues. We make sure that we co-ordinate work shifts in a way that there’s always a female inspector at the post throughout the day,’ said Meera.

As most trafficking cases pertain to women and children, these female inspectors, most of them from Nepal, are very crucial for interrogating suspects. ‘We visually scan all the people crossing the border and looks out for discrepancies like too many women travelling alone, or a young couple that doesn’t look married and yet the woman is adorned with too much jewellery (to not catch the attention of these detectives), and the like,’ explained Meera, while she took me on one of her routine checks at the border gate. The women she found a little out of place, were first asked some simple questions about their native village, and further enquired about where and why they were travelling to India. ‘If they are being trafficked, with or without their consent, there’s always going to be some loopholes in their details,’ she elaborated.

Raj Nath, a resident of Pachpakhariya village of the Uttaranchal border, and an experienced human trafficking inspector, who recently reported a case of human trafficking where the trafficker and the victim were in two different vehicles, was first introduced to the anti-trafficking industry by sheer coincidence. Nath is now touted as one of the best connected people in the area. ‘We’re not very different from the traffickers or the victims – we come from the same socio-cultural background, speak the same language, and even look similar, which helps us in the job. It’s been 8 years since I first joined an NGO as a trafficking inspector; today, I can confidently say that I know all the villagers who live within 10km from the border,’ said Nath, while constantly keeping an eye on the human traffic crossing the border gates, even as he spoke to me. ‘I depend heavily on local tongawallahs and shopkeepers for tips that I explore further to catch potential victims,’ he added.

The traffickers, especially the experienced ones, always come up with an itinerary that has minimum possible check-post stop time, and the inspectors believe that their biggest disadvantage is the lack of time to check each and every human being crossing the border. While on one of my field visits, Pooja Chand, a 23-year-old newly inducted trafficking officer, happened to catch a major trafficking case by sheer coincidence. A bus had arrived barely two minutes before the gates were to open, and she suspected that the move might be planned in advance, by the driver, to hide something illegal. She then got onto the bus for a headcount, and found that there were two extra people travelling without a ticket. Later when she called the police officers and forced the driver to reveal the details, they found that two girls, from Rasuwa district in Nepal, were being taken to Delhi by a trafficker. The girls were obviously given fake job prospects and told to keep a low profile as they didn’t have adequate proof of identity. ‘If it was physically possible to check each and every person, we would catch many more trafficking cases,’ claimed Pooja.

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‘How can we report victims who refuse to believe that they’re victims?’

By Ruchika Rai

Nepal-India border. Image: flick user jackol, CC license.

I didn’t expect to witness human-trafficking gangs being busted by anti-trafficking workers on the Indo-Nepal border in the Terai, and I was proven right. My first blow came after just two days in the field, when I saw eloping couples being passed off as trafficking cases in the record books of desperate social workers. As a vagabond journalist, the border area had always been of much interest to me; after all where can a person better study the confluence of cultures than in this ‘open’ haven of trade and crime. Nonetheless, the current status of human trafficking in two of the countries where the practice is most common seems a tad different from popular perception.

The Ujjawala Scheme of the Government of India, Women and Child Development Ministry, was rolled out in 2007-08 to prevent trafficking and promote rescue and rehabilitation of trafficking victims. Meera Samant, a Nepali anti-trafficking inspector who works under the Ujjawala Scheme, was my mentor at the Banbassa check post (Uttaranchal). The first piece of information she shared with me laid open the dim reality of anti-trafficking work. ‘Organised trafficking almost always happens through the easily accessible illegal routes between the countries, and most cases that you will find here are pertaining to women who emigrate willingly. How can we report victims who refuse to believe that they’re victims?’ she answered, puzzling me further with her question.

So does that mean there has been a decline in human trafficking? There is more than one answer to that.

According to a research paper titled ‘Myths About Human Trafficking’ by Ronald Weitzer, Professor of Sociology at George Washington University, ‘ activists and some government officials in the US claim that Human Trafficking is now the second largest criminal enterprise in the world, after drugs, as the profit generated by the industry is pegged at a staggering $5-$12 billion, annually.’ However, the author cautions against the ‘dubious nature’ of such estimates, – ‘US State Department reported in 2010 that only 0.4% of the estimated 800,000 victims have been identified and assisted worldwide.’ He adds that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has also put forth similar numbers, and claimed that 5000 to 10,000 women from Nepal are trafficked for sex work every year. The above statement begs us to ask why there is such a discrepancy between the estimated number of victims and the number of ones that are being identified.

Having said that, there’s still some trafficking taking place in the area, even though not on the same scale as the agency estimates suggest. So who are these people, and why are the millions of dollars currently flowing into the anti-trafficking industry of India and Nepal not able to help the situation? The old story of poor ignorant village girls being hoodwinked by city boys has no relevance anymore because even the smallest villages in Nepal are sensitised by social workers against human trafficking.

Rita Bhattarai, co-ordinator of Maiti Nepal, an NGO that works across the country and even oversees to help victims of trafficking, explained the situation: ‘Villagers do attend community awareness programs on the subject, but abject poverty and lack of entrepreneurship still results in sizeable exodus of human population. We conclude that women end up falling prey to dubious job and marriage offers oversees, and are often later forced into prostitution. However, the biggest problem for us is a sheer lack of testimonials by victims, who hardly give any details about the sexual exploitation or violence they go through.’

Families don’t accept women who once go missing or end up in prostitution. The fear of social rejection forces victims to keep encounters of sexual abuse discreet. Neha Shreshtha was only 16 years old when she decided to follow Dharam Ram, a mechanic in Delhi, to the city, only to end up being sold by him for Rs 20,000. ‘I was confident that he loved me and wanted to marry me, and so, I defied all social norms to elope with him. He did marry me, but that didn’t last for long. He then decided to get rid of me and make some money so he sold me to Raman Lal, a resident of Laxmi Nagar in Delhi, who runs a small general store,’ she said, counting on my promise to keep her identity safe. She later allowed me to use her real name, ‘I don’t think any of my acquaintances can read English. It doesn’t matter if you print my name,’ she mumbled, more to herself than to me, as if rejoicing at the fact that she still had places to go where an anonymous existence was possible. She has been hiding in her village for the last three months, and needs to find a safer place before her second master, who bought her from Lal for Rs 25000, turns up at her house.

Organised trafficking, therefore, shouldn’t really be the single-point agenda for social workers on the border. Exploitative international marriages and jobs that affect a chunk of the population, and are often recorded as human trafficking, need to be combated separately. Activists in the area believe that creating a culture of registered marriages would prove to be a great step in the direction. Similarly, job registration should be made more stringent and emigrants should be tracked right from their villages. If girls from Neha’s village were to decide to follow her footsteps and go abroad for work, they should be well geared to return safely too. Besides, criminalising prostitution has also resulted in a social stigma surrounding human trafficking, which pronounces the victim to be a culprit. Families and relatives of victims clearly need more insight into the matter too, so that rehabilitation is possible for anyone who once goes off-track.

By Erik Wilson

It’s February. For anyone that lives in Nepal or has been to Nepal you know what that means: load shedding, and lots of it. Reports this year suggest that at its peak this season, Nepal will experience around 18 hours of power cuts every single day. A friend recently told me that he wakes up in the dark and goes to sleep in the dark; his house is completely without power day after day. Forget the daily annoyances; people can’t work properly, children can’t study properly and the nation as a whole slowly grinds along waiting for the monsoons to arrive.

As such, it would seem that this is an opportune time to revisit the perennial problem that plagues Nepal’s power supply – hydroelectricity. Nepal’s current hydropower generation falls around 600 megawatts, with a demand of about 900-1000 megawatts (and growing), leaving the country with a 400 MW deficit. A recent article suggests that Nepal is only generating an additional 6 MW of hydro capacity every year out of its potential 42,000 MW of generating capacity, while demand tends to increase 10% per year on average. If these numbers continue as such for the next 10 years, Nepal’s energy deficit will have increased more than fivefold. What would appear to be a relatively approachable energy deficit now would rapidly become insurmountable. And let’s not forget, the current energy deficit equates to 18 hours a day without power during the dry season. In 10 years at these rates there will surely be 24-hour blackouts for weeks at a time.

Hopefully, in 10 years we’ll be able to look back on this piece of writing and laugh. But the fact that it’s a point of discussion, the fact that this possibility is even on the table – particularly when Nepal’s hydropower generation amounts to a meager 1.5% of its potential generation – is a travesty, and inexcusable.

The main hurdle in power generation over the past few years has been political will. Upon their ascension to power in 2008 the Maoists put forth the bold plan of generating 10,000 MW over 10 years. However, as soon as they found themselves out of power, the party rejected new hydro projects saying that most of the power would be sold to India. This is but one example of how hydropower and the general welfare of the Nepali people have been used as a political bargaining chip.

The recent deal with the Chinese to bring much needed money for hydro development to Nepal is a start, but politicians must hold true to their plans and promises, and citizens must hold them accountable. 2012 has been deemed Nepal investment year – the first step should be keeping the lights on.