Five years ago, Rashmi Tiwari recalls entering a small tribal home in Orissa, as part of a social welfare funding project for CEO Clubs, India. The ground reality of the red corridor in the country shook her to the core.
She stared in absolute horror, as parents of minor girls as young as 5-6 years old, offered them to her in exchange of money.
While one home had three grown up girls sharing one set of clean clothes, most daily wage laborers struggled to have two meals a day. This marked the watershed moment of her life.
“Minor girls were being pushed into the web of trafficking and nobody was bothered. I was witnessing the worst kind of human rights violation on the ground of my own country.”
Returning to Delhi, she decided to quit her corporate job and luxurious life to visit tribal areas of India in an attempt to understand the extent of trafficking and empower tribal girls and women.
Who is Dr Rashmi Tiwari?
Rashmi was only nine when she was pushed out of the comfort of her Mumbai home with her single mother. There was no roof over her head and certainly no source of income for her uneducated mother. Enrolled at Saraswati Uchchatar Kanya Vidyalaya in Varanasi at 10 years old, there was never enough money to buy school uniform or books or lunch.
It was a common to see a young Rashmi break into Amitabh Bachchan’s Aaj Rapat Jaayein or mimic him to entertain the senior girls, who lent their old belongings to her. She’d work at the soap factory as a child labourer after school. Living out of a 3.5 x 5.5 m box room in Varanasi, she completed her Masters and earned her PhD degree in Economics from Banaras Hindu University in 1998-99. She then established herself in the corporate world.
Human trafficking v/s Sex trafficking
How many times have you witnessed a neighbor or a friend calling out to a choti in their homes to get you a glass of water or feed the toddler, and you did not bat an eyelid?
While ‘sex trafficking’ draws a sharp response from most people, human trafficking as modern day slavery – by hiring underage girls as child laborers or domestic helps – easily disguises itself as a socially accepted norm, says Rashmi.
