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The Hindu Notes for 9th February 2019
  • Topic Discussed: The Hindu Notes of 9th February 2019

    • Surveying India’s unemployment numbers

    India’s labour participation rate, very low by world standards, fell sharply after demonetisation. Women bore the brunt

    Monthly measurement of the unemployment rate is one of the requirements of the Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The SDDS — India was one of the early signatories —was established in 1996 to help countries access the international capital markets by providing adequate economic and financial information publicly. India complies with many requirements of the SDDS, but it has taken an exception with respect to the measurement of unemployment.

  • The Government of India does not produce any measure of monthly unemployment rate, nor does it have any plans to do so. Official plans to measure unemployment at an annual and quarterly frequency is in a shambles. This does not befit India’s claims to be the fastest growing economy and as the biggest beneficiary of a famed demographic dividend.
  • The Centre for Monitoring India Economy (CMIE), a private enterprise, has demonstrated over the past three years that fast frequency measures of unemployment can be made and that seeking an exception on SDDS compliance is unnecessary.

    • Higher frequency survey

  • The CMIE decided to fill India’s gap in generating fast frequency measures of household well-being in 2014. In its household survey, called the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS), the sample size was 172,365 as compared to that of the official National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), which was 101,724. In both surveys, the sample selection method has been broadly the same.
  • The CPHS is comprehensive, surveying its entire sample every four months. Each survey is a wave. The CPHS is also a continuous survey, and so, for example, three waves are completed in a year. The CMIE’s CPHS thus has a much larger sample and is conducted at a much higher frequency than the NSSO’s.
  • Further, the CPHS is conducted as face-to-face interviews necessarily using GPS-enabled smartphones or tablets. Intense validation systems ensure high fidelity of data capture. All validations are conducted in real-time while the teams are in the field. The data capture machinery ensures delivery of high quality data in real time obviating the need for any further “cleaning”, post field operations.
  • Once the data is collected and validated in real-time, it is automatically deployed for estimations without any human intervention.
  • In 2016, the CMIE added questions regarding employment/unemployment to the CPHS. Since then, the CMIE has been generating labour market indicators regularly and making these freely available for public use (https://bit.ly/2OxLAs4).
  • A difference between the CPHS and the NSSO surveys is the reference period of the employment status of a respondent. While the NSSO tries to capture the status for an entire year and for a week, the CPHS captures the status as on the day of the survey. This could be as one of four factors: employed; unemployed willing to work and actively looking for a job; unemployed willing to work but not actively looking for a job, and unemployed but neither willing nor looking for a job.
  • Since the recall period in the CPHS is of the day of the survey (or the immediate preceding day in the case of daily wage labourers) and the classification is elementary, the CPHS has been able to capture the status fairly accurately with no challenges of the respondent’s ability to recall or interpret the status. In contrast, the NSSO’s system is quite complex.
  • The large CPHS sample is distributed evenly across rural and urban regions for every week of the execution cycle of 16 weeks of a wave. It is this machinery that enables us to understand the Indian labour market with fast-frequency measures. So what do these fast-frequency measures tell us?

    • Key findings

  • The most important message from the data is that India’s labour participation rate is very low by world standards and that even this low participation rate fell very sharply after demonetisation. The average labour participation rate was 47% during January-October 2016. The world average is about 66%.
  • Immediately after demonetisation in November 2016, India’s labour participation rate fell to 45%; 2% of the working age population, i.e. about 13 million, moved out of labour markets. That is a lot of people who were willing to work who decided that they did not want to work any more.
  • The data show that it was not the employed who lost jobs and decided to stop working. The employed mostly retained their jobs. But it was largely the unemployed who decided that the labour markets had been so badly vitiated after demonetisation that they gave up looking for jobs any further. In short, they lost hope of finding jobs in the aftermath of demonetisation.
  • As more and more unemployed left the labour market, the unemployment rate fell. This is because the unemployment rate is the ratio of the unemployed to the total labour force. This fall gave misleading or at least confusing signals, almost implying that the unemployment rate was falling in a positive sense. In reality it was a reflection of an exodus of the unemployed from the labour markets — a fall in the labour participation rate. And this underlines the much greater importance of the labour participation rate.

    • On female labour

  • Specifically, India’s female labour participation rate is very low. Official statistics have always shown that India’s female labour participation rate is low and falling. Researchers have shown that this fall is because of rising household incomes that reduce the need for women to join the labour force; increased enrolment in higher education by women which delays their entry into the labour force, and cultural and security factors that keep women away from the labour market in India. Further, it is evident that employers are also biased against hiring women.
  • The CPHS shows that the situation with respect to women’s participation in the labour force is extremely poor — much poorer than what the official agencies tell us. The entire brunt of demonetisation was borne by women. Their labour participation fell sharply while that of men did not.
  • After the demonetisation jolt came the Goods and Services Tax shock of July 2017 that drove away small enterprises which could not compete in a tax-compliant environment out of business. This caused a substantial loss of jobs. Preliminary estimates suggest that employment shrunk by 11 million in 2018. The brunt of this was again borne largely by women. But men too were also impacted.
  • Male labour participation rate was 74.5% in 2016. This dropped to 72.4% in 2017 and then to 71.7% in 2018. In contrast, female labour participation was as low as 15.5% in 2016 which dropped to 11.9% in 2017 and then 11% in 2018. Urban female labour participation rates fell faster than rural female participation. In urban India it dropped from 15.2% in 2016 to 10.5% in 2018. The corresponding values for rural women were 15.6% and 11.3%, respectively.
  • Although female labour participation is substantially much lower than male participation, the few women who venture to get employment find it much more difficult to find jobs than men. The unemployment rate for men was 4.9% in 2018 and that for women in the same year was much higher — 14.9%.
  • This higher unemployment rate faced by women in spite of a very low participation rate indicates a bias against employing women. Drawing women into the labour force by removing the impediments they face to at least bring their participation levels close to global standards is critically important for India to gain from the demographic dividend opportunity it has. This window of opportunity is open only till 2030. By not using a good data monitoring machinery, the Indian government is keeping both itself and the citizenry in the dark.
  • Mahesh Vyas is Managing Director and CEO, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai

    • Forty years after the Iranian revolution

    A political change beckons which will not be easy but it is as certain as the overthrow of the Shah

  • Friedrich Nietzsche prophesised with remarkable accuracy that the 20th century would be marked by great wars fought in the name of philosophical ideas. But what Nietzsche could not have anticipated was that towards the end of the 20th century there would be a revolution in the name of god, establishing a Shi’ite theocracy. The Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 (picture) was a momentous development in the modern history of Islam. And it had a huge impact on all movements across the globe, especially those that were using Islamic frames of reference for political activism.
  • Some, like the French thinker Michel Foucault, enthusiastically declared the Iranian revolution as the spirit of a world without spirit. Foucault wrote: “One bears on Iran and its peculiar destiny. At the dawn of history, Persia invented the state and conferred its models on Islam. Its administrators staffed the caliphate. But from this same Islam, it derived a religion that gave to its people infinite resources to resist state power. In this will for an ‘Islamic government’, should one see a reconciliation, a contradiction, or the threshold of something new?” Following Foucault, we can say that from the very beginning, the Iranian Revolution remained a significant social and political transformation full of paradoxes and unpredictable twists.

    • Clerical rule

  • The Iranian revolution was surprising not because it caused a monarch to collapse, but because of the way in which people organised themselves and participated in massive demonstrations. Like many other revolutions, it united several groups, classes and parties who, despite different ideologies, were all against the old regime.
  • Also, in the Iranian revolution as in the French and later the Russian revolutions, the coalition did not last very long and the Iranian clerics ended up having a leading role. But, the interesting point is that most non-clerics who were in the opposition against the Shah of Iran underestimated the probability of clerical rule, despite the presence of the clergy in all major political events in Iran since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. Moreover, for too many observers inside and outside Iran today, events leading up to the revolution in 1979 took a mystifying and seemingly irrational course. But, unfortunately, those who try to explain hastily and emotionally the causes of the Iranian revolution and the Shah’s collapse generally only tend to focus on one or another specific issue such as the alleged corruption of the regime, the undemocratic ways of its rule, the effect of repression, or the economic gap between the rich and the poor.

    • Social tensions

  • If we consider the Iranian revolution not only as a political event but also as a psychological watershed, exactly as it was the case with the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 in Germany, we can understand why many Iranians believed back in 1978 that there was a messianic nature to Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership. In truth, Khomeini’s success in the Iranian revolution had certainly nothing to do with divine providence, but given that the Iranian population believed for centuries in the divine right of kings, it should have come as little surprise that the people were receptive to such ideas rather than having an acute sense of political pragmatism. Khomeini’s leadership, followed by the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, therefore, can be understood in patrimonial terms, assisted by periodic doses of charisma. The immediate consequence of this socio-religious attitude was to institutionalise Khomeini’s role as the leader of the revolution.
  • But there is also a political side to the story: Khomeini was not only popular among common Iranians for his uncompromising attitude to the Shah and his anti-imperialist and populist rhetoric since 1963, but also because he and his followers were fully ready and organised for the establishment of an Islamic regime in Iran. As a result, defying all the myths of secular modernisation and shattering all the political ideologies of modernity, the Islamic Republic became the first theocratic state in the modern world to have institutionalised the Shi’ite idea of Velayat-e-Faqih, or the “rule of the jurist”. However, the institutionalisation of Khomeini’s role as the “faqih” did not manage the implicit tensions which continue to exist between tradition and modernity.
  • Despite total Islamisation and the reign of terror unleashed on political groups, there were advancements of Iranian civil society due to demographic changes, the rise of literacy and the magic fluidity of Iranian society. The insertion of cultural politics into the everyday lives of young Iranians in the name of Islamic purity created the reverse attitude and a sentiment of confrontation with the Islamic regime.
  • Looking at Iran today, one can say that the ‘growing generational gap between the Islamic state and the Iranian youth, particularly young women, has never been wider. The question to ask would be: if the participants in the Iranian revolution wanted more than anything to be seen and to be heard, why, then, did the revolution degenerate into such violence and tyranny which still plague Iran? Why did people power collapse in on itself, engendering repression, stifling thought and action’?
  • These questions remain unanswered, but if one thing is certain, it is that Iran is going towards a political change. This political change is not going to be an easy and a quick one, but it will happen with the same certainty that the revolution happened.
  • Ramin Jahanbegloo is Director, Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Peace, Jindal Global University, Sonipat

    • Nigerian renewal

    Muhammadu Buhari’s mixed record in office makes the presidential contest an open race

  • As Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari seeks re-election, his mixed record on the economy and security fronts has made for a close contest. Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil-producer, has barely recovered from a recession following the 2014 global slump in crude prices. The government claims to have curbed inflation, though it is in the double digits. Unemployment, which has climbed to over 20% since Mr. Buhari took office in 2015, could hurt his prospects among a predominantly young population. The adverse sentiment from the current grim global climate for foreign investment may have been compounded by the negative signals emanating from the billion-dollar fines slapped on the region’s telecom giant. Last year Lagos declined to join the African Continental Free Trade Area after steering negotiations among the 55 African Union states. The decision dealt a blow to the prospects of transforming Africa into an open and diverse economy, and strengthened the perception that Nigeria was not doing enough to move away from its dependence on oil wealth. In the prevailing atmosphere of rampant institutional corruption dating back decades, Mr. Buhari’s image as a morally incorruptible leader held sway with a disillusioned electorate during the 2015 polls. That reputation is still intact. But the former army general now seems politically vulnerable following electoral reverses in the provinces last year. More worrisome for him would be the defection of several members of the ruling All Progressives Congress party to the Opposition People’s Democratic Party. The most prominent of them is Mr. Bukhari’s main challenger in the presidential race, Atiku Abubakar, a two-term former vice president. The suspension of Nigeria’s chief justice on corruption charges last month has raised apprehensions over respect for the popular will in Nigeria. Besides many Western governments, Mr. Abubakar has cautioned the President against electoral interference.
  • On the security front, Mr. Buhari has had moderate success in pushing back Boko Haram, the Islamist terror organisation that gained notoriety some years ago for the shocking disappearance of 200 children. But the group continues to resort to acts of kidnapping and massacre in its stronghold in the northeast. Meanwhile, even as the violent conflict between farmers and herdsmen festers, concerns have been raised about the lack of equipment for the security forces. A new law passed last year lowering the age to run for public office, could make for a more inclusive democracy. But until the financial entry threshold to the political arena is lowered significantly, such laws will have little impact on the ground. Nevertheless, for a country blighted by bloody dictatorships for many years since the end of colonial rule, the coming polls should inspire confidence in the gradual strengthening of its nascent institutions.

    • The Jharkhand way

    The Opposition would do well to focus on State-level coherence in alliances

  • The Congress’s alliance with three regional parties in Jharkhand fits a template that could make it enduring. The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal have joined hands with the Congress in Jharkhand, a State that sends 14 MPs to the Lok Sabha. The seat-sharing agreement gives seven seats to the Congress, four to the JMM, two to the JVM and one to the RJD. In turn, the JMM gets a larger share of seats in the Assembly election, that will also take place in 2019. In the 2014 Assembly election, the BJP won the State with 31% of the vote. Collectively, constituents of the new alliance got 47% of the vote. Alliances don’t only turn on arithmetic. What makes this alliance potent is the synergy among its partners, with ground reports indicating that workers of these parties have developed a certain comfort level with one another. Collectively, they have command over all the regions, and appeal to all social groups of the State. As much as a third of the State’s population is tribal, and the alliance is expected to reach out to this section. These factors explain the sweep that the alliance of the Congress, the JMM, the RJD and the CPI had in 2004. That was the last time Jharkhand had a rainbow alliance — it won 13 of the 14 seats, while the BJP won only one seat, Koderma.
  • State-level alliances will hold the key in the election this year. A countrywide alliance involving vote transfer from one regional party to another is impractical. A national grand alliance against the BJP will be more optics than substance. In Uttar Pradesh, the alliance between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party has unsettled the BJP, while the Congress’s efforts to assert its own space by introducing Priyanka Gandhi Vadra as a front-line campaigner has opened up the field to further possibilities of political realignment. Regional parties function with their focus primarily on local power calculations, and an appreciation of that factor by regional leaders and the Congress can be the basis of stronger bonds. The confusion in the non-BJP camp in Uttar Pradesh is partly due to the lack of appreciation on this point, while the contrasting picture of synergy among them in Bihar and Jharkhand is driven by an acknowledgement of mutual interests. While chemistry and arithmetic are both important, potential participants in a non-BJP coalition must also be mindful of optics. Regional leaders hopping around to make a show of a nascent grand alliance may not add up to much, even as they render it vulnerable to attacks — of the sort lobbed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he termed it a Mahamilavat, or grand adulteration. They will do better by staying grand, and staying regional.

    • A Himalayan travesty

    Survivors of sex trafficking in Nepal were shocked when a local politician convicted of selling young Nepali girls to brothels in India was released by the Supreme Court of Nepal last year. Rajneesh Bhandari reports on the victims’ fight for justice

    A Himalayan travesty
  • On a cloudy day in October 2018, Nirmala Tamang, 24, was working in a field near Ghyangfedi, a village 80 km northwest of Kathmandu, gathering food for her family’s cattle. She cut the green leaves with her sickle, expertly bundling them together. In the background, one could hear the murmur of the river that flowed through her village and the faint gush of a waterfall. It seemed like a pastoral idyll, but there was fear raging in Nirmala’s heart. She was afraid for herself and her two children.

    • Nirmala’s suffering began more than a decade ago, when her first husband sold her to a trafficker, forcing her into years of prostitution in neighbouring India. In 2008, Sun Bahadur Tamang, an influential local politician, was convicted of trafficking Nirmala and charged with trafficking two other Nepali women. Activists say Sun Bahadur may have trafficked more than 200 women from Nuwakot district and other parts of Nepal. But on April 19, 2018,theSupreme Court of Nepal cleared him of all charges and ordered his release on the grounds that his accusers must have mistaken his identity.

  • His release came as a shock to Nirmala. “I am scared,” she says. “But I want justice.” With poverty and earthquakes crippling an already fragile economy, Nepal, in recent years, has become a major hub of human trafficking. More dangerous than the earthquakes, however, is the fact that powerful people behind trafficking networks enjoy impunity. The traffickers get away, say activists, because of their strong ties to politicians, corruption in the police force, and their skill at exploiting loopholes in the system. Arrests are rare and largely limited to low-level operatives.

    • Sold by her ‘husband’

  • Nirmala is the youngest of the five children in her family. She was never sent to school and spent her days mostly doing household chores. The village was her playground, and the cattle her friends. But her life changed abruptly when she turned 12. “We have this strange system of marriage in our community,” Nirmala says. “If a boy likes a girl, he can take her forcefully and the girl is considered to be his wife. I was forced into such a ‘marriage’ in 2007, when I was 12.”
  • Months later, her ‘husband’ Tikaram Tamang, 18, told Nirmala that he was sending her away to work. In February 2008, Nirmala was trafficked from her home in Ghyangfedi to agents who worked for Sun Bahadur. Promising her a good job and a better future, they took her to Kathmandu, and then to Bhandup in Mumbai.
  • “I don’t know for how much I was sold,” says Nirmala, holding her one- and-a-half-year-old son. Her captors forced Nirmala into the sex trade in Mumbai. Subsequently, they sent her to a brothel in Delhi, run by a woman who the police later identified as Sun Bahadur’s third wife, Radha Tamang. “It was terrible,” Nirmala says. “I don’t want to think of those days again.”
  • In the Delhi brothel, she found nearly a hundred other Nepali girls, including two from her own village. She met her ‘husband’ Tikaram twice in the brothel. On both occasions, he had come to collect the money that she had earned. “I pleaded with him to rescue me, but he ignored me,” she recalls.
  • Police records show that Tikaram went to the brothel six months after Nirmala started working there, and was paid ₹5,000 by Radha. He returned a second time for more money six months later, but was not paid, and returned home empty-handed.
  • Tikaram, currently in Nuwakot prison, claims that he had fallen in love with Nirmala. He denies selling her into the sex trade. “We have appealed our case in the high court,” he says. “I am innocent.” However, in a statement to the police given in September 2015, Tikaram had confessed to taking Nirmala as his wife by force and then selling her.
  • Social workers from Prabashi Nepali Manch, a local NGO, rescued Nirmala from the brothel in July 2013. By then, she had worked in the sex trade for five years and four months. One of the rescuers was the man to whom she is now married, and with whom she has two children.
  • After returning to Nepal, Nirmala initially stayed at a shelter run by Shakti-Samuha, an NGO run by victims of human trafficking. She filed a case against Sun Bahadur, charging him with luring her with the promise of work and forcing her into sexual slavery.

    • An open secret

  • In Nuwakot, Sun Bahadur’s alleged involvement in human trafficking is treated as an open secret. “Our elders, teachers, and those working in the social sector say that Sun Bahadur used to sell girls. They say that he has multiple wives who are running brothels in India,” says Ashmita Thapa, an activist from Nuwakot.
  • Sun Bahadur allegedly sent scores of girls from Nuwakot to brothels in India, according to a police official involved in the investigation. The investigator says that Sun Bahadur was close to the region’s power brokers and was insulated from any action by law enforcement agencies. Ashmita says that police and administrative officials visiting Ghyangfedi would often stay at Sun Bahadur’s home as there weren’t any good hotels in the area.
  • Thanks to his powerful political allies, Sun Bahadur could operate freely, activists say. The victims, on the other hand, remain silent, fearing retribution. “They don’t want to come forward because they don’t feel secure,” says Sunita Danuwar, co-founder and Executive Director of Shakti-Samuha. “Our society doesn’t support these girls. Many are still in brothels in India. Even after several years of forced labour in the sex trade, they don’t want to come back because they don’t think there is a better life awaiting them outside.”
  • Activists say that Sun Bahadur made five copies of his citizenship documents. They believe that in the process, he manipulated the dates on the documents, a move that could have aided his subsequent release on the grounds of mistaken identity.
  • Interestingly, none of the trafficking charges have impeded his political ascent. In a local election held in May 2017, Sun Bahadur was elected as Ward Chairman of Dupcheshwor Rural Municipality-1 despite having been convicted of human trafficking by the Nuwakot District Court.
  • Yadhunath Khanal, Sun Bahadur’s lawyer, denies that his client has done anything wrong. “All the charges are fake, we have a strong case,” he says. “It’s all political propaganda.”
  • Watching his successful political campaign, Nirmala lost any illusions she may have had about democracy and justice. The man convicted of trafficking her, she says, used money and power to win an election. Activists agree. “He is a key asset for politicians from the Nepali Congress,” says Ashmita. She adds that Sun Bahadur’s seeming invincibility is one of the reasons many are afraid to speak out against him.
  • Sun Bahadur’s party says it supports the due process of law. But the party is yet to take any action against the politician. “We support the investigations and the legal procedures connected to the case,” says Bishwo Prakash Sharma, a spokesperson of the Nepali Congress. “People like him get support from the Nepali Congress or other parties because of election politics, and the need for local support. This phenomenon is not related to one party; it is seen in other political parties too.”

    • Conviction and release

  • The Nuwakot District Court convicted Sun Bahadur in two separate cases, in 2011 and 2018, sentencing him to six years in one case and to 37 years in the second. But Sun Bahadur continued to remain at large even after being sentenced in the first case. It was only after the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Nepal took charge of the case that he was arrested in December 2017.
  • Following his conviction, other victims cautiously came forward, filing complaints against him with the police. As they took up these new investigations, the police began getting phone calls from politicians, asking them to tread carefully.
  • Sun Bahadur’s lawyers then approached the Supreme Court, arguing that the politician was a victim of mistaken identity. The Supreme Court quashed the District Court’s order and ordered that he be released. Justices Purushottam Bhandari and Om Prakash Mishra ruled that there was insufficient evidence to establish that the person charged in the case was Sun Bahadur.
  • Activists viewed the ruling with suspicion. “There was political influence in the case. That’s why the trafficker was freed,” says Sunita. “We want the Supreme Court to be independent, free from political influence, and deliver justice.”
  • But in Nepal, the ties between the judiciary and politicians run deep, as parties play a crucial role in the selection of judges. Judges are picked on the basis of party recommendations. “There is a high degree of politicisation and party politics in the Supreme Court. Party members are selected as judges. How can we expect independence and impartiality from our judiciary?” says Narayan Prasad Panthee, joint registrar with the Supreme Court of Nepal.
  • Former Chief Justice of Nepal’s Supreme Court Sushila Karki, in her autobiography, Nyaya, talks about her own experience of dealing with pressure from the ruling party. Political leaders, she writes, “came to my residence regarding the appointment of judges. I was called by different political leaders recommending their choices as judges. Political leaders even gave me a list of names of who should be appointed. I didn’t select those who were listed, but this shows what the current situation is.”
  • A review of the police case file shows that trafficking victims had positively identified Sun Bahadur, who is well-known in his district through his political involvement. Narayan Prasad, however, says that he cannot comment on a specific case related to Sun Bahadur since the judges have delivered their verdict.
  • Activists and the police who were investigating the case are shocked that the courts have accepted the argument that the politician was prosecuted in error. A senior police officer in Nepal, who requested anonymity, describes the Supreme Court’s ruling as a textbook example of granting impunity.
  • “There are immense loopholes in our system,” says Assistant Inspector General Pushkar Karki, who has headed many human trafficking investigations. “The perpetrators are experts in evading the law, and the victims pay the price.”
  • Pushkar says that the country lacks a central, computerised identification system. As a result, traffickers can easily alter dates and addresses and create false alibis. The multiple copies of identification documents that Sun Bahadur is reported to have secured ahead of his trial have heightened suspicion among advocates and the police that he had done some skulduggery to get rid of the serious charges against him.

    • Nuwakot, a trafficking hub

  • Though there is no information on when exactly human trafficking began in Nuwakot, activists say that the rulers of the Rana dynasty, which controlled Nepal from 1846 to 1951, used to visit the villages of Nuwakot to take girls back to Kathmandu and exploit them. Later, they took the girls to India as well, says Ashmita. The victims were then forced to procure more girls and women to be trafficked.
  • Trafficking remains rampant in Nuwakot and in other districts outside Kathmandu, including Sindhupalchowk and Dhading. Official records show a high number of girls from Nuwakot being trafficked to brothels in different Indian cities — so much so that there is a dearth of women for marriage in the district.
  • According to a report published by Nepal’s Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizen, 678 human trafficking victims were rescued from 26 countries in 2016-2017. But the government figures bear little relation to the scale of the problem in Nepal, especially after the April 2015 earthquake. According to government records, 311 adults were trafficked between July 2016 and July 2017. Of these, 95% were female and three in four victims had no education. Alarming as these figures are, they do not represent the full magnitude of the problem, as most of the trafficking goes unreported.
  • Another report by Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission estimated that 23,200 people fell victim to traffickers in 2015-2016, of which 6,100 were trafficked and 13,600 escaped attempts of being trafficked. Some 3,900 victims remained missing. Nearly all of them were women or young girls.
  • “We have the Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act, 2007, but there are challenges,” says Roshani Devi Karki, who monitors human trafficking at the Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizen. The principal challenge? “Effective implementation of the law by the concerned authorities.”
  • The nature of trafficking is also changing. Though it started with sex trafficking, it has now grown to include the trafficking of labourers to West Asia. Children who were orphaned due to the 2015 earthquake have also become vulnerable to trafficking. The open border between Nepal and India has allowed traffickers to easily transport victims from Nepal to Indian cities. To fight all these problems, Nepal has created a ‘transportation control bureau’ to monitor trafficking. But many are wary. Will the powerful and politically protected perpetrators ever be brought to book?

    • Fear of the future

  • In February 2018, Shakti-Samuha and other organisations wrote a joint letter to government agencies and commissions, alleging that Sun Bahadur had been involved in trafficking for 20 years and that he has four brothels in India. “Releasing a culprit who is involved in organised crime has increased the challenges for victims’ security, protection and justice,” the letter read. They also questioned Nepal’s Election Commission: “How could a trafficker win an election?”
  • Nepal’s CIB also filed two other cases against Sun Bahadur in the court. Following the Supreme Court’s release of Sun Bahadur on April 19, 2018, the police re-arrested him the following day on the charge of human trafficking in another case in connection with Nirmala’s abduction. Sun Bahadur, who is currently in jail in Kathmandu, has gone to court against his re-arrest. The case is ongoing at the Patna High Court.
  • Nirmala fears that if the politician is released again, he could come after her. “Some traffickers are freed and some are released on bail because of political power,” Sunita says. “If this keeps happening, the survivors will find it tough to keep their hopes of justice alive.”
  • Nirmala lives just an hour’s walk from Sun Bahadur’s home in Nuwakot. “Three years ago, I was on my way to collect relief supplies for my children when I was kidnapped by Sun Bahadur’s men and forced to sign some documents,” she says. She has no idea what documents she was forced to sign. Ever since she was attacked, she has avoided taking the road by his village.
  • Narayan Prasad says that a big problem for the victims is the lack of a policy or infrastructure to protect them. “There is no witness protection and resettlement policy for the victims in Nepal. That leaves many of the survivors vulnerable to further victimisation.”
  • After a day of toil in the fields, as Nirmala walks home, her thoughts are all about her children’s future. “I want them to study,” she says. “But I am not sure if I can protect them and give them a good future.”
  • This story is a collaboration between Journalists for Transparency and 100Reporters, a non-profit news organisation. The name of the trafficking survivor has been changed to protect her identity