Taking cognisance of the report, the NHRC issued notices to the secretary, social justice and empowerment, Haryana, and the DGP, Haryana, on August 19. Shakti Vahini, an NGO working against trafficking of minors, had lodged an official complaint citing the Outlook report before Justice Sujata Manohar, an NHRC member. Justice Manohar issued the notice asking the Haryana government officials to respond within a period of three weeks.
The NGO has urged the NHRC to immediately decide the fate of a 13-year-old girl who was trafficked from Assam and sold in Haryana and is now pregnant. This girl was rescued by the Haryana police but is being kept in a remand home for adult criminals in complete violation of the Juvenile Justice Act. Shakti Vahini also requested that the Haryana police be directed to explain what steps they have taken to check trafficking of girls from poverty-stricken areas in the Northeast to Haryana.
Activists are now hopeful that the NHRC’s intervention will help curb this menace. The political establishment in Haryana and Punjab have been completely immune to trafficking of girl-children from tribal areas in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and the Northeast to their states as sex slaves. The practice of buying young girls from touts and exploiting them as sex slaves has a wide social sanction in the backward Mewat region of Haryana and even prosperous rural areas of Punjab. Social acceptance allows the sexual exploitation of girl-children to continue unabated in the region. The NHRC’s move is the only bright spark in this otherwise grim scenario.
