Trafficking risk rises:

Subcontinent

The worst drought in decades across several states in India is forcing tens of thousands of people to migrate from rural areas in search of water, food and jobs, increasing the risk that they may be trafficked or exploited, activists said.

About 330 million people, almost a quarter of the country’s population, are now affected by drought, the government estimates. Destitute women, children and older family members left behind in the villages are most at risk of exploitation.

“People in the rural areas have always been vulnerable because they want better jobs, better lives,” said Mangala Daithankar at non-profit Social Action for Association and Development in Pune, in western Maharashtra state.

“The drought has aggravated the situation because they are so desperate now. They have absolutely nothing,” said Daithankar, who has worked in the state’s drought-hit Marathwada region for about two decades.

Maharashtra is one of the worst affected states, with successive years of poor rainfall ravaging crops, killing livestock, drying up reservoirs and forcing farmers into indebtedness that has led to thousands of suicides.

In the state’s Jalna district, scores of villages house only destitute women and children left in the care of older relatives who keep an eye on their homes and parched fields. “There’s no water, so there are no jobs to be had on the fields and no food to feed their families,” said Vishwanath Todkar at non-profit Paryay in Osmanabad district, which is helping build water management systems in some villages.

“The women and children are particularly vulnerable, as there is no one looking out for them,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Men and their wives have moved to cities including Mumbai and Pune in search of jobs on construction sites and as day labourers, sleeping under flyovers and on pavements. Some have been reduced to begging on the streets, activists say.

Others, with their families, have been lured to work for little money in harsh conditions in one of the hundreds of brick kilns in the state. Many single women and widows have been trafficked into prostitution in the cities. (RTRS)