Chandigarh, July 10: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) in its report has chronicled rampant large-scale trafficking of girls from other states into Haryana where they are held as bonded labourers and forced into marriages.
Such girls are nicknamed Paro (of Devdas fame) in the villages of Haryana, particularly in Mewat area. The girls are forced to marry against their will and are "sold" at price that varies according to their age, beauty and virginity.
The UN report has blamed Haryana's fast declining female sex ratio for large-scale trafficking of girls from other states.
The report, “Current Status of Victim Service Providers and Criminal Justice Actors in India on Anti-Human Trafficking-2013”, states: “There's a large-scale trafficking of girls from the North-East. These girls are being brought to Haryana for forced marriage and bonded labour.
"Karnal, Mewat, Rewari, Kurukshetra, Jind, Yamuna Nagar and Hisar are some destinations where these girls are taken to.”
The shortage of brides in Haryana and Punjab is often bridged through "forced marriages of poor girls from places as far as West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and UP.
The report says, placement agencies, mostly in Delhi, Punjab and Haryana procure girls to work as domestic srvants and then sell them to rich farmers in Haryana on the lookout of brides.
The report quotes National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) to say, 2,625 children have been missing in Haryana since 2006. Of these, 1,016 are girls. A total of 4,731 persons went missing in which there were 2,075 women.
Not fair to fairer sex
The land of khaps and honour killings has the dubious distinction of having the worst sex ratio in the country with just 879 females per 1,000 males as against the national figure of 943.What is alarming is the fact that the state has the worst male-female ratio (1000:834) in the age group of 0-6 years.
