By Matters India Reporter
Kansabel, October 28, 2019: An anti-trafficking crusader nun in Chhattisgarh has done it again.
She has rescued two more teenage girls from the central Indian state who were sold to brothels in Pune and Goa.
The girls, aged 19 and 16, are siblings of a Bhil tribal family in the Kerasa village of Surguja district.
Traffickers exploit the tribe’s acute poverty, bemoans Franciscan Missionaries of Mary Sister Annie Jesus Mary, who helped rescue the girls.
The nun is the director of Jeevan Jharna Vikas Sanstha (JJVS, foundation for the progress of life stream) at Kansabel in Chhattisgarh.
She said a trafficker, Kaleshwar Paingra from Sahibavna village in Jashpur district, knew how to entice and then blackmail gullible Bhil girls.
Paingra and his companion seduced the two girls with money, gadgets and false promises. Once the girls were hooked, the agent convinced them to leave home at midnight without alerting others, Sister Annie told Matters India on October 28.
So, on September 6, the girls left the house and reached the spot the agents had told them. The agents took them into the forest and sexually abused them. The next day they boarded a train heading to Pune, Maharashtra, the nun narrated.
At some junction, the girls were separated and the agent took one girl to Pune while his friend took the other to Goa.
The two girls were then sold in brothels for 27,000 and 18,000 rupees respectively. The agents returned to their village, confident that their act would remain a secret.
However, members of self-help groups that Sister Annie started in the district alerted her foundation about the girls’ disappearance.
The foundation informed the Village Vigilant Committee of Kerasa and Sahibavna villages, said Sister Annie.
The nun and her volunteers immediately reached the village, brought the girls’ parents to the Kansabel police station and filed a First Information Report (FIR) about their missing daughters.
With the support of the vigilant committee, the foundation managed to nab the agents and hand them over to the police.
After investigations, the police networked with their counterparts in Pune and Goa. They sent the same agents to bring the girls back, which they did on October 13.
The police handed the girls over to the nun’s foundation that kept them in its ‘Short Stay Home’ for initial counseling and recuperation.
After a few days, the girls were brought before the officials of ‘Women and Child Welfare Department’ for final clearance.
The girls are now with their family. They will resume their studies by enrolling in the coming batch for the residential tailoring and embroidery courses in JJVS campus, Sister Annie said.
The nun, who began the crusade in early 2000s, says traffickers will continue to target tribal communities in Chhattisgarh unless their economic condition is improved. The tribe lives near the state’s forest and survives on primitive cultivation and forest produce.
According to Sister Annie, wide spread substance abuse, absence of basic facilities and lack of educational and employment opportunities, besides poverty, has led to the rise in child trafficking in Jashpur district, where she is based.
The nun’s nearly two-decade-old work to check trafficking has been noticed at the national level.
She was among six people who received the tenth Jijabai Achievers Awards earlier this year for making viable impacts among the poor at the grassroots.
The Women Development Cell of Shivaji College, University of Delhi, distributed the award on January 16 as part of an international seminar on “Gender Parity: Issues and Challenges.”
The college’s women development picked up Sister Annie for creating ripples in Chhattisgarh. It hailed her as an empowered and determined woman who fights tirelessly against the evil of child trafficking in Chhattisgarh.
Earlier on March 8, 2018, she received from Indian President Ramnath Kovind the Women Empowerment Award of the federal Ministry of Women and Child Welfare, New Delhi.
On the same day two years earlier, she had bagged the state award for anti-human trafficking from Raman Singh, the then Chhattisgarh chief minister.
The nun’s JJVS that works for the all-round development of the tribal communities in Chhattisgarh began addressing human trafficking in 2003. It was registered as a society in 2006.
In the past five years, it has covered 71 panchayat, 180 villages of five blocks with awareness programs, workshops and training. It also conducted awareness among students and teachers in 63 schools.