Shocking Report: Three million female sex workers in India

New Delhi: Three million women are engaged in commercial sex activity (CSA) in India, a 50% rise from 1997. Over 60% of those trafficked into sex work are adolescent girls in the age group of 12-16 years. More than 35% girls in India enter CSA before 18 years of age. India has three lakh brothels in 1,100 identified red-light areas, housing nearly five million children in addition to commercial sex workers, the report by philanthropic foundation Dasra, the Hummingbird Trust and Kamonohashi Project said. More than 25 percent women in commercial sex activity in India are in Maharashtra (14.20 percent) and West Bengal (13 percent), the report said. Despite increasing public outcry about violence against women in India, systematic large scale abuse in the name of commercial sex work remains socially acceptable. The report aims to draw attention to the growing victimization of women, highlights high impact non-profits working on the issue and the outlines the role of philanthropy in scaling their efforts. Over the last six months, Dasra's team worked closely with the report sponsors to follow a comprehensive diligence process.In India, prostitution is legal under certain conditions and a number of related activities, including soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, owning or managing a brothel, pimping and pandering, are crimes.In ancient India, there was a practice of having Nagarvadhus, "Brides of the town"(grooms). Famous examples include Amrapali, state courtesan and Buddhist disciple, described in Vaishali Ki Nagarvadhu by Acharya Chatursen and Vasantasena, a character in the classic Sanskrit story of Mricchakatika, written in the 2nd century BC by Sudraka. In Goa, a former Portuguese colony in India, during the late 16th and 17th centuries, there was a community of Japanese slaves, who were usually young Japanese women and girls brought or captured as sexual slaves by Portuguese traders and their South Asian lascar crewmembers from Japan.During the British East India Company's rule in India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was initially fairly common for British soldiers to frequently visit local Indian nautch dancers. Likewise, Indian lascar seamen taken to the United Kingdom frequently visited the local British prostitutes there.In the 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands or even millions of women and girls from continental Europe and Japan were trafficked into British India, where they worked as prostitutes servicing British soldiers and local Indian men.Prostitution is widespread in India, although it is currently a contentious issue. Districts bordering Maharashtra and Karnataka, known as the ‘devadasi belt', have trafficking structures operating at various levels. Brothels are illegal de jure but in practice are restricted in location to certain areas of any given town. Though the profession does not have official sanction, little effort is made to eradicate or impede it.The largest and best-known red-light districts are Sonagachi in Kolkata, Kamathipura in Mumbai, G. B. Road in New Delhi, Kashmiri Market in Agra, Ward No.14, Silchar in Assam and Budhwar Peth in Pune host thousands of sex workers. In recent years red-light centres across various parts of India are common place for international sex tourism.Earlier, there were other centres such as Maduahdiah in Varanasi, Naqqasa Bazaar in Saharanpur, Chaturbhuj Sthan in Muzaffarpur, Peddapuram and Gudivada in Andhra Pradesh. Meerganj Allahabad Ganga Jamuna Nagpur. kabadi bazar of Meerut.