The main focus of EMPOWER PEOPLE lies on awareness raising and sensitization trainings for law enforcement agencies. The organization is also offering direct victim support and assistance to women vulnerable to human trafficking and domestic violence. |
| The Gadiara lodge where the girls were kept confined. (Gopal Senapati) |
The girls from Behala and Barrackpore were lured to the two-storey lodge, around 70km from the city, by “friends” two months ago.Two teenage girls forced into prostitution at a riverside lodge in Gadiara fled to freedom after scaling the wall of the sleaze den on Tuesday night.
Police arrested the owner of the lodge, Tilak Maji, and his wife Puja, and the manager, Bablu Pradhan.
The trio had forced the girls into prostitution, said Akhilesh Chaturvedi, additional superintendent of police (rural), Howrah. “The girls have been sent to a home for destitutes in Liluah.”
The rescue of a 16-year-old South 24-Parganas girl from a hellhole in Delhi on Thursday has turned the focus on the rampant trafficking of girls in Bengal. The state government has admitted in the high court that 2,500 girls go missing in the state every year.
Behala resident Mithu, 17, (named changed) told the police that her friend Indira had handed her over to traffickers after inviting her to her sister’s birthday party. She landed at the Gadiara lodge, at the confluence of the Hooghly and the Rupnarayan, on November 10.
A youth had allegedly offered to marry 17-year-old Shilpa (name changed), took her to Gadiara on a holiday and sold her to the lodge owner.
The girl from Debagram in Barrackpore, who worked as a beautician at a parlour in Howrah’s Ramrajatala, told the police that the youth had handed her to the traffickers for Rs 40,000.
The police said Shilpa had requested one of her customers to call up her grandfather and narrate her plight to him. The customer did so on November 17.
The next day, the 62-year-old grandfather got in touch with the CID. The old man and his daughter also went to Barrackpore police station several times and pleaded with the officers to rescue Shilpa. But the cops allegedly did not take any action.
On December 20, the girl had sent another letter to her grandfather through a customer, urging him to rescue her immediately.
“Then I decided not to depend on the police anymore and rushed to Gadiara. I reached the place on Tuesday evening with Shilpa’s mother and started looking for the lodge in which she was confined,” the grandfather recalled.
He learnt from local residents that the lodge was “actually a sleaze den”.
He went to the lodge and started calling out for her granddaughter. Hearing him, Shilpa and Mithu rushed out and escaped by scaling the boundary wall of the lodge.
The residents arranged for the four to spend the night in a house near the lodge. On Wednesday morning, they went to Shyampur police station and lodged a complaint.
Asima Dalui, a local resident, said: “Everybody knows the lodge owner runs a sleaze racket in connivance with the police.” Officers of the police station denied the allegation.
Additional police superintendent Chaturvedi said the role of the local cops would be probed.
Posted in: Rescue
