Sex work is the source of livelihood of this nomadic community near Mandsaur

At 16, Rekha’s biggest worry is not studies, exams or peer pressure. What bothers her is that her 10-month-old baby is a boy.

“It happened,” she says gesturing towards the infant, “when a client forced me to have unprotected sex last year.” Rekha says she didn’t stop working. “I have to keep doing it for him,” she says, but adds that had the baby been a girl, she would have at least brought in money to put food on the table.

Rekha belongs to a nomadic community whose source of livelihood has been sex work. While the women of the family are the breadwinners, the men, who live off their earnings, casually refer to this practice of caste-based prostitution as “tradition.”

Hundreds of families of this community live along the State highway from Mhow to Neemuch in Madhya Pradesh, mostly between Ratlam and Mandsaur.

Their camps, mostly one- or two-room brick structures, serve as highway brothels for truckers and motorists, and double up as black holes of HIV, alcoholism, drug abuse and human trafficking. Driving along the highway during the day, one sees an unusually large number of young girls sitting by the roadside, combing their hair, getting some sun, playing.

At night, these girls sit huddled around a fire, waiting for motorists to slow down. It is usually an older woman who bargains, sometimes for as little as Rs. 200 for a group of 13-14-year-olds, who can be seen fiddling with their smartphones.

Male infanticide

For many in the communitty, sex work defines a family’s social standing. The birth of a girl is celebrated while a male child is considered a lifelong liability.

Not long ago, community elders admit, people used to resort to male infanticide to do away with the trouble of raising a boy. “Girls earn money. Men don’t do anything. They have to be sustained and we have to pay the girl’s family Rs. 10 lakh as bride price to get them married,” says Heera Bai, a 50-year-old woman.

Families with more girls enjoy a higher status. “I have five daughters and except one, all are in the business. Today, I own four pieces of farmland and two tractors,” says Chandar, 58. Despite having alternative means of livelihood, Chandar continues to live off the “earnings” of his daughters because “it’s tradition, it doesn’t stop.”

Sunita, one of his daughters, continues to ‘work’ despite being diagnosed as being HIV positive six months ago. For a girl from this community, marriage is unviable. For boys, it’s just too expensive to pay the bride price, which keeps increasing, as a girl is an asset and once married, she is out of business.

But Heera, who has “done it all her life,” wants a different life for her daughter Sita. She is using her lifelong savings — earned from sex-work — to pay for her daughter’s nursing education. She sounds worried about her daughter’s future. “If after all her training she does not get a job, what choice will she have?” she says.

Trafficked daughters

Those who do not have daughters are condemned to a life of poverty and find themselves at the bottom of the social strata. To move up the ladder, they resort to “buying” of daughters.

“I was abducted from my uncle’s house and brought here when I was 11. My new mother gave me away to two men who took me to Gujarat and sold me off at a railway station. From there, I was taken to Chandrapur in Maharashtra,” says Geeta (14), an inmate of Apna Ghar, a children’s home in Mandsaur. Geeta managed to escape with the help of a village sarpanch.

There are several such girls at Apna Ghar, most of them rescued from the camps about three years ago following a crackdown led by the then superintendent of police, G.K. Pathak.

“Girls are trafficked from all over the country and even from Nepal and Bangladesh. It is facilitated by a three-layered structure involving abductors, middlemen and buyers. Once here, they are either pushed into flesh trade by their ‘new parents’ or sold to others,” Dr. Pathak told The Hindu .

Recently, the police rescued over 115 girls; 55 were handed over to their parents while the rest are at Apna Ghar. “The problem in this region is that drug trafficking and human trafficking are linked. It is not possible to solve one in isolation,” says Dr. Pathak.

“This problem cannot be addressed without targeted efforts by several government agencies — health, education, administration. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged MPs and MLAs to adopt villages...why don’t local politicians adopt villages inhabited by this community and work at reform?” he wonders.

(All names have been changed to protect identities)