Brothels are being turned into offices and flats as city’s property market takes off

It is dusk in Lane 14. Pools of water in the potholes reflect the lights flickering in an office block high above. The skeletal cement frames of half-built apartments are silhouettes against the darkening sky.

Down in the narrow alley below, trade is slow. It is early; the women spread plastic sheets in front of the rickety building that is both home and workplace, and share a frugal dinner. The rooms they rent for 300 rupees (£3) a day are too small for anyone to share a meal indoors.

The scene in Kamathipura, in the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, appears timeless. Established in the late 18th century by the British, the neighbourhood has been a hub of sex work and trafficking ever since. Yet what is one of the oldest and biggest red-light districts in the world may be living out its final days.

“It’s almost over already. Everything is shutting. It’s the end of Kamathipura,” said Hasina, 38, who has worked and lived there for two decades.

Few beyond the brothel owners and the traffickers will mourn its passing, however. “This is a terrible place,” Hasina said.

Mumbai now has some of the most expensive real estate on earth and demand for land in this hugely overcrowded city of about 20 million is high. Developers have long eyed the lanes of Kamathipura but India’s flagging economic growth in recent years and a lack of investment capital has held them back. Though almost all the area had been bought up by dealers at the height of the country’s economic boom, projects to turn its brothels, cafes, grocery shops and workshops into offices, malls and flats never got going.

Now however, with the promise of major reforms by the new government, business confidence has picked up again and development projects planned a decade ago are being dusted off.

“It’s moving again. There are fresh notices being served on buildings used for sex work. They are telling people it is time to leave,” said Pravin Patkar, who runs the anti-trafficking organisation Prerana in an outlying area of Kamathipura.

There is little thought for those who live and work here. Fatima, a 32-year-old sex worker, said the building in which she has lived and worked since being sold by her sister to a brothel owner at the age of 12 is slated for demolition. Details are scant – but she knows there will be no compensation for her. Eviction notices are expected any day.

“I have no idea where I would go. I have no family, no savings, nothing. Just my son [aged nine] to look after,” she said.

About 10,000 female sex workers live in Kamathipura, an estimated third of the total 20 years ago. They come from all over India, as well as neighbouring countries Nepal and, increasingly, Bangladesh. Almost all have been trafficked, sold by relatives or lured by men who convinced them that a better life awaited them in Mumbai. Police are paid off, or turn a blind eye. A special trafficking court is little deterrent.

Younger women, the new arrivals, are routinely kept captive, sometimes locked in small rooms for weeks or months on end or blackmailed into remaining.

For Sati Sheikh, 27, it was threats of violence to her two small children that kept her in a brothel, seeing about six clients every day. “They threatened to sell them both. I was compelled to work‚“ she said.

Once in the trade, most women remain. There are few other options. Local employers refuse to take them on, even for menial jobs. “They won’t even let us clean for them. Are we not human?” Sheikh said.

One way out is through their children. NGOs working in the neighbourhood organise the placement of sons and daughters in local schools. When they are old enough, the children start work, allowing their mothers to pay off debts to brothel keepers and leave.

“I’ve done this for 20 years so my daughters won’t have to do it. My son is in college and working in an ice-cream parlour. He is now supporting me so I can stop,” said Devi, 36.

Sex workers in Kamathipura say they pay a fee of 1,500 rupees every two weeks to local police to avoid harassment. With rents rising to 9,000 rupees a month for a single tiny room, many are looking for alternatives even before their homes are demolished.

“The rate at which the women are leaving is high and the numbers coming in are dropping but not because fewer are being trafficked but because so many other places are coming up in Mumbai,” said Patkar, the NGO director.

The scattering of prostitution around the city is making it much harder for organisations to reach vulnerable women and their children.

“The dispersal means they will suffer more,” Patkar said. “Here we can give them services. We run a clinic, get the kids into schools. That’ll be much harder to do.”

The supreme court is considering whether to legalise prostitution, or at least clarify its legal status.

By 10pm, trade has picked up in Lane 14. Under a Chinese lantern carefully suspended under two street lamps, the women wait for clients, talking softly, watching film clips on their mobile phones.

A child parts a grubby curtain of red cloth in a doorway and reveals a tiny room where a girl sits on a bed combing her hair in a pink plastic mirror. Then someone pulls the curtain shut.