India’s Sex Industry

As applause erupts around her, 16-year-old Seema*, dressed in a white salwarkameez (a traditional Indian costume), accepts a box containing a pair of gold earrings. Beaming, the slender, elegant girl bends down and touches the feet of the petite woman beside me.

I’m in the courtyard of Astha Nivas, a children’s home in the old part of Hyderabad, watching Sunitha Krishnan felicitate students who’ve done well in their 10th-standard exams. Going by the cheerful hubbub, it could be prize-giving day at any girls’ school. In fact, most of the 120 children here – some as young as three – are victims of sexual exploitation whom Sunitha has rescued. Many, like Seema, were subjected to horrifying sexual abuse for years; nearly all are HIV positive. But thanks to the love and attention they receive at Astha Nivas, they have a good chance of overcoming their dark pasts.

Each pair of the pretty earrings that Seema and 13 other students received today costs Rs3000 ($61.50). “Won’t some of the girls be tempted to sell the jewellery?” I ask.

Sunitha bristles at the suggestion. “They’re not just girls,” she snaps. “They’re my daughters. If your daughters did well in their exams, wouldn’t you give them something valuable?”

The curt reply is typical of Sunitha’s response to any aspersions cast on her charges. But she’s not just their fiercely protective mother; she’s also an intrepid and determined foe of India’s huge and powerful commercial sex industry. In the last ten years, she has rescued around 2000 victims of sexual slavery. She has persuaded the Andhra Pradesh government to work with her in cracking down on this organised crime and helped secure the conviction of more than a dozen traffickers. Says Dr P.M. Nair, senior police officer and leading anti-trafficking expert: “Sunitha works in territory most people wouldn’t dare venture into. And she’s had a major impact.”

Opening a drawer of her office desk, Sunitha pulls out an iron rod with a hook at one end. “This is to protect myself,” she says. “If necessary, I’ll use it.”

She’s not joking. Sunitha’s actions hurt criminal interests – and they regularly strike back. Since she started her crusade in 1991, Sunitha has been beaten up more than a dozen times. That’s why she can’t straighten her left arm or hear in her right ear. A Sumo van once deliberately rammed her autorickshaw, but she escaped serious injury. She’s had acid flung at her (fortunately it missed), and there’s even been a poisoning attempt.

Far from being intimidated by all this, 36-year-old Sunitha has even refused police protection. She says attacks on her are to be expected, given her mission.

Sunitha has always wanted to help other people: as a child, she’d return home from school and teach the neighbourhood children what she’d learned. By her teens, she’d decided to work for the underprivileged, especially women victimised and disdained by society. She plunged into a number of causes and also got a master’s degree in psychiatric social work.

In 1996, Sunitha, an ardent feminist, was arrested – along with more than a dozen other activists – for protesting against the staging of the Miss World competition in Bangalore, her hometown. By now her radical views had estranged her from her family, so when she was released two months later she decided to move to Hyderabad where she could make a fresh start.

She soon became involved with the housing problems of slum dwellers. When the homes of people living by the city’s Musi River were slated to be bulldozed for a “beautification” project, she organised protests and stalled the scheme.

In early 1997, following a court order, the police evicted prostitutes from Mehboob-ki-Mehndi, a notorious Hyderabad red light area. Carried out with typical bureaucratic ham-handedness, hundreds of prostitutes were suddenly homeless. Desperate, many committed suicide.

By this time, Sunitha had become friendly with a Catholic brother named Jose Vetticatil, who was just as committed to helping the underprivileged. Sunitha and Brother Jose met the evicted women who said they wanted their children to be educated so that they, too, didn’t end up in the sex trade. Sunitha set up a classroom for five children in an empty brothel, and became its first teacher.

As Sunitha grew friendlier with the prostitutes, they began telling her about trafficked children confined in brothels. Right away, Sunitha knew she had to free them.

Because of the danger of violence from traffickers, Brother Jose was dead against the idea. But Sunitha refused to play safe. Each rescue was a cloak-and-dagger operation, dependent on accurate information, perfect timing, and a clean getaway. Sunitha had never attempted anything remotely similar, but she trusted her instincts and her informants and was able to pull it off. Initially, the children she rescued were placed in missionary and charitable juvenile homes; later she started her own shelter.

Slowly, Prajwala (which means eternal flame), as Sunitha and Jose named their organisation, took on additional responsibilities. Today, apart from Astha Nivas, the children’s shelter, Prajwala has five day schools for the children of prostitutes in Hyderabad and a residential facility in the city called Asha Niketan, for rescued adult women. It has also helped other NGOs set up and run 17 day care centres for prostituted women’s children across Andhra Pradesh.

While the children at Astha Nivas and the day schools are educated up to the seventh standard and then transferred to private high schools, the older victims are trained in a number of useful skills ranging from bookbinding to masonry and welding. They are then placed with private companies or given a job at Prajwala Enterprises, a small-scale unit that mostly makes and sells stationery and furniture.

In its early years, Sunitha had to sell her jewellery and even most of her household utensils to make ends meet at Prajwala. She also learned to chase donations – “I have a PhD in begging,” she says.

Hyderabad businessman Muralidharan T. testifies to that. In August 2001, following heavy rains, Muralidharan’s offices were flooded and substantial equipment damaged in a new company he’d started. He and his employees wondered if the business would survive. Then Sunitha arrived, asking for donations – not for Prajwala, but to help people whose homes had been washed away. “She was so persuasive,” Muralidharan says, “that to our astonishment we all found ourselves donating money.”

The devout catholic, Brother Jose, and the devout Hindu, Sunitha, made an unlikely team. “He was the brains, I the doer,” she says. So it was a great blow when Jose suddenly died of a heart attack in 2005. But Sunitha recovered. In 2006, she married film director Rajesh Touchriver. Her husband, apart from providing much needed emotional support, also helps her make films that educate the public on the evils of sex trafficking.

Prajwala, with a staff of 200, two-thirds of whom are survivors of prostitution, has thrived under Sunitha’s leadership. It now has an international reputation and Sunitha is regularly consulted, in addition to the Indian authorities, by the United Nations and the US government. She has also won several awards, which she has used to strengthen Prajwala’s finances. Recently, Sunitha received a request from an unexpected quarter: the South Korean government wanted her help in improving their shelters for victims of trafficking. She agreed, but not before the South Koreans promised to arrange a two-day stay for her in a local brothel so that she could study the local situation closely.