“We get hounded for our work. This ... will further the harassment’: India’s sex workers speak out against draft law

Reeling from pandemic debt and poverty, women in the industry are fearful of new draft legislation on trafficking that could take away their agency, reports Alisha Rahaman Sarkar

Sonagachi is Asia’s biggest red-light district, but Covid has made footfall dwindle (AFP/Getty)

Asha* sits on a bench in one of the musty bylanes of Sonagachi, Asia’s largest red-light district in the state of West Bengal, awaiting clients past noon on a Friday.

Pre-Covid, she would have accepted two clients by 1pm, but some days now pass without a single man asking for her.

Malati*, who also makes her living through sex work, takes the morning train every day to travel 60km to Kolkata.

As she sipped her tea near a rented room in a multi-storeyed building in the city, she said providing online schooling for her son during the pandemic is slowly pushing her family into debt.

“There is barely anyone visiting these days. On good days we end up getting one customer where I get paid 300 rupees (£2.96). On other days we return without any money. A lot of us travel from faraway places. Travelling in public transport has also become expensive,” Malati said.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought sex work to a halt in India, where roughly 900,000 people are involved with the profession, according to the health ministry.

The unofficial number is estimated to be around 1.2 million.

When Covid-19 hit India, sex workers were one of the first people to stop their services due to the high risk of contracting the virus.

Sonagachi, home to at least 7,000 residents and 3,000 visiting sex workers, used to record an estimated footfall of 21,000 customers on weekdays.

Now the number of visitors has dwindled to around 5,000.

The worsening financial situation has forced many women not to return to the brothels where they are expected to pay a chunk of their income as rent, which many can no longer afford.

And sex workers, reeling under pandemic debt and poverty, are now worried that new draft legislation, pushed by prime minister Narendra Modi’s federal government, will take away their agency and right to work, safe from policing and criminalisation.

In July, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) introduced the Draft Trafficking in Persons (Prevention, Care and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2021.

It aims to “prevent and counter trafficking in persons, especially women and children, to provide for care, protection, and rehabilitation to the victims while respecting their rights, and creating a supportive legal, economic and social environment for them”.

But activists allege that the 38-page document conflates trafficking with sex work and needs better scrutiny.

The Supreme Court last year directed the state governments to supply dry grains to women involved in prostitution without asking for documents after the Durbar Mahila Samanway Committee (DMSC) – the country’s oldest sex workers’ committee – knocked on their doors.

Prostitution, “sexual servitude or other kinds of sexual services, including pornographic acts or production of any pornographic material” has been defined as sexual exploitation in the legislation and activists say this will lead to consent for sex work being nullified.

Taking away the agency of women engaging in sex work can be held as a violation of Article 19 (1) (g) of the Indian constitution which upholds a citizen’s right “to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business”.

We get hounded for our work. This law will further the harassment

“This is an authoritarian bill,” Mariam Dhawale, general secretary of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) told The Independent.

“Sex workers and their rights should be in the heart of policy response. Those who have been trafficked should not be considered criminals,” she said, adding that “criminalisation may further push the workers to the city’s underbelly and inflict more exploitation on them. Sex workers will be prosecuted. We asked for a meeting but the government did not respond”.

And India has a serious trafficking problem, mostly due to dwindling employment opportunities and a porous border in the east with Bangladesh.

The country registered 1,714 cases of human trafficking in 2020, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

According to the report, 4,709 victims, including 2,222 below the age of 18, were trafficked across the country.

Through the draft bill, the government aims to cover all aspects of human trafficking such as sexual servitude, enslaved labour and organ smuggling.

It plans to address the long-standing demand of offering protection to trafficking survivors and broadens the geographic purview to criminalise those in and out of the country.

The bill also proposes to bestow the National Investigative Agency (NIA) with the power to gather intelligence from different parts of the country through Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTUs) at multiple levels.

Since the bill was notified on the women and child development ministry’s website on 30 June welcoming suggestions from “all the stakeholders,” several sex workers’ organisations and rights activists have written to the government demanding a meeting with minister Smriti Irani.

But, to their shock, the government listed the bill for introduction, consideration and passing during the monsoon session of parliament on 12 July.

It is now likely to be tabled during the winter session in November.

Flagging some of the concerns, AIDWA released a memorandum where they asked the ministry to closely re-examine and overhaul the bill as it “is vague on certain issues and badly drafted and depends mainly on a draconian regime of harsh punishments to achieve its purpose”.

"The present Act overlaps in material articulations with several other legislations like Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956, the Bonded Labour Act, the Juvenile Justice Act and the Protection of Children From Sexual Offences Act 2012. We feel that instead of strengthening those legislations, just creating another Act providing parallel remedies and punishments is unnecessary and confusing,” the memorandum said.

Activists fear an earlier approach of raid and forceful rescue will continue as the government has failed to include “rescue guidelines” in the new bill.

Punishments under it vary from seven to 10 years in prison to the death penalty.

Mahashweta Mukherjee, an advocacy officer with DMSC said multiple protest letters have been written to the government asking for more time to study the Bill.

“Stakeholders are given one month to ponder over any draft legislation, but it was violated with the trafficking bill. We have sent multiple protest letters seeking a meeting but none has responded to our cry. Neither do we support criminalising sex work nor the death penalty,” she said.

The organisation demands that the bill should be made available in all official languages for the people involved in the profession to understand.

As of now, only the English version of the Bill is accessible on the internet.

While rights activists and organisations are raising a storm to bring their voices to the government's notice, many sex workers are barely aware of what is about to hit them.

Asha, when asked about the future, said: “We get hounded for our work. This law will further the harassment.”

“But this is all I do”.

*The names of sex workers have been changed due to their request for anonymity