Kerala- no longer hundred per cent in literacy?

Kerala, which was once regarded as the cent per cent literate state, has started loosing its sheen now. The state lost its enviable position due to its failure to prevent more than a million neo-literates from relapsing into illiteracy. The new giants of this position are the two northeastern states of Tripura and Mizoram, says a study by the State Council for Educational Research and Training.

The study showed that 5% of the students in class VII cannot identify alphabets, 35% of them can’t read or write their mother tongue, while 85% students are poor in basic science and 73% in mathematics.

Class IV students did not fare any better – 47% students can’t write in Malayalam and 25% in English. The case with maths and science was even worse: while 63% students are poor in mathematics, 73% do not have even basic knowledge in science, it said.

The study was conducted among 4,800 students of class IV and VII in Kasargod, Thrissur, Ernakulam, Pathanamthitta and Thiruvananthapuram districts. The students were tested in language, maths and basic science. As many as 19% students in Thiruvananthapuram scored zero in geometry.

The illiterates, or those who never went to any school, fared far better. They were able to read and write after attending literacy classes for a few months.

However, there are some indicators leading to the loss of position, they are listed below:

Short staffed: The state also has a glut of teachers. A recent study by the education department showed that more than 3,500 schools in the state had less than 30 students each in 2014. There were 46,240 teachers in these schools, which translates to 13 teachers for every 30 students – or one teacher for every two students.

Unemployable:Thousands of MBBS graduates and hundreds of post-graduates are languishing without jobs in the state at present, according to Kerala Medical Post Graduates Association.

As regards engineers, a survey conducted as part of National Employability Report for 2011 showed that Kerala figured at number 10 in terms of employability in the IT services sector among 16 states. This is despite one in every two students either dropping out of the course or failing in the exams.

The professional graduates add to the swelling army of unemployed in the state. The unemployment in the state is over three times the all India average. The number of unemployed in the live registers of employment exchange in 2013 stood at 39.78 lakhs.

Source: Elets News Network (ENN) Posted on October 5, 2015

Holy cow, unholy violence

The cow has been converted aggressively into a symbol for a religious orthodoxy demanding its place in a secular nation state.

If you love cows and care for them, you have three choices:

Choice A: Build goshalas or cow shelters where the animals can be taken care of. But this is an expensive proposition. There is heavy investment and no returns whatsoever, despite all the talk of the great medicinal value of cow urine and cow dung.

Choice B: Ban beef, stop farmers from selling cows and bulls to butchers, outlaw the culling of cattle, punish cow smugglers, declare all slaughter houses illegal, lynch people who eat beef, and justify all this using complex arguments. This results in a large number of cows (which can no longer give milk) and bulls or oxen (that are too weak to be draught animals), being abandoned to simply wander the streets eating garbage and plastic or just starving to death since Choice A is unavailable. It also destroys industries and creates widespread unemployment.

Choice C: Build local slaughterhouses near farms so that commercially unviable cattle can be humanely culled nearby, without their having to endure great suffering while being transported in horrible conditions to distant slaughterhouses. This controversial suggestion was made by none other than N.S. Ramaswamy, founder-director of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and noted animal rights activist.

Guess which is the preferred option of the rising multitude of go-raksha vigilantes? Not A, as it is too expensive and tedious, and involves too much work. Not C, because we are conditioned to believe that violence can do no good. So it is Option B, which has the advantage in that it gives people power. It allows them to terrorise and dominate Muslims and liberals. It gives them global attention and makes them the focus of a controversy-hungry media. It is this rather than cow protection that the go-rakshaks really seek.

There is no love for cows in the go-raksha brigade — an idea systematically and meticulously unravelled in the essay ‘Why is the Cow a Political Animal?’ by Sopan Joshi, a Research Fellow at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, published in Yahoo! in May this year. It is all about power, a yearning to dominate. So, all the talk about the economic reasons for saving cows, and the importance of cow milk, cow urine and cow dung are just a rationalisation for that one single goal: to dominate and reclaim masculinity, following the perceived emasculation by the Muslims, the British and now the liberals.

Devdutt Pattanaik

New form of Hinduism

A new form of Hinduism is emerging around the world: one that is tired of being seen as passive and tolerant, like a suffering docile wife. It wants to be aggressive, violent. So it prefers Durga and Kali to the demure Gauri; Shiva as Rudra and Virabhadra and Bhairava rather than as the guileless Bholenath or the august Dakshinamurthy; and the Krishna of the Mahabharat to the affectionate Bhagavata Krishna. It visualises Ram without Sita. It wants its Ganesh to lose that pot belly and sport a six-pack ab. All this while insisting, with violence if necessary, on the values of vegetarianism and seva and ‘giving up the ego’, which is the principle of ‘sanatana dharma’ — not just a religion but a way of life.

This new form of Hinduism is what we call Hindutva. We can call it a sampradaya, a movement within the vast ocean of Hinduism that has many such movements, traditions, forces and counterforces. Hindutva sampradaya, like all sampradayas in history, insists it is the true voice of Hinduism. Like allsampradayas, it rejects all alternative readings of Hinduism.

And so, when you direct them to an article, ‘The Hindu View on Food and Drink’ by S. Ganesh and Hari Ravikumar on IndiaFacts.com, which draws attention to the fact that while Vedic scriptures do value the cow, they have no problem with the consumption of bulls and oxen and barren cows, members of the Hindutva brigade will question the credentials of the authors and their Hinduness, invariably in language that is hyperbolic, rhetorical and violent. There is no room for discussion or nuance here. The only language is force and bullying. Where is this coming from?

It comes from institutionalised paranoia: a belief that innocent Hindi-speaking rural Bharat needs rescuing from an evil English-speaking India that favours Nehru, from the liberals who equate Hinduism only with casteism, and from Euro-American scholars who insist Shiva is a ‘phallic’ god. And, to be fair, there is a modicum of truth in their argument.

In his book Rearming Hinduism, Vamsee Juluri expresses outrage at the way Hinduism is being projected in the U.S. That outrage and anguish is genuine, and can be felt in the NRI community that has increasingly become more and more vocal, even aggressive. When ‘liberals’ deny this outrage and anguish, it seems to consolidate the paranoia of the Hindutva sampradaya. When the liberal press dismisses the book by Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples — What Happened to Them, as right-wing propaganda, and gleefully declares that the Hindu memory of Muslim kings destroying thousands of Hindu temple is just not true on the basis of Richard Eaton’s Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India, you start wondering if the scientific and historical method is simply designed to mock all things that a traditional Hindu simply assumes to be true. When the banning of radical literature does not meet with the same outrage as the banning of Wendy Doniger’s Hindus: An Alternative History, a section of the population starts feeling that they are alone, isolated and rejected, by the people who claim to be fair and just and liberal.

How do you strike back at those who simply invalidate your memories and beliefs by constantly quoting science and facts? You simply create your own narrative and dismiss theirs. And this is what is happening in the beef-eating discourse. It is a symbolic attack on the ‘educated Indian’ who did not stand up for Hinduism in the international arena. And the Muslims, sadly, are the tragic collateral damage.

In the 1980s, we saw how the then Congress government tried to appease the Muslim orthodoxy in the Shah Bano case by diluting even a Supreme Court judgment that gave maintenance rights to divorced Muslim women, but did not bother to appease the Hindutva sampradaya in the Roop Kanwar sati case when the court declared sati a crime and not a religious act. In these cases, women were simply symbols in a fight where religious orthodoxy was demanding its place in a secular nation state. Now, it is the turn of the cow to be that symbol.

When the secular nation state tilts in favour of one religion and seems to be persecuting another, there is bound to be a backlash. And that is what we are facing now: a karma-phala (karmic fruit) of karmic-bija (karmic seed) sown by the Congress on the one hand, when it unashamedly appeased Muslim religious orthodoxy, and the liberals on the other, who endorsed their secular and rational and atheistic credentials by repeatedly projecting Hinduism as only a violent and oppressive force. Let us ponder on our contribution to the rising tide of ahimsa terrorism, while the still starving ‘rescued’ cow wades through garbage in Indian towns and villages, eating plastic.

(Devdutt Pattanaik writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times. www.devdutt.com)

Keywords: Beef ban, cow slaughter, Hindutva, sampradaya, Hindus, Muslims, violence over beef-eating, politics over beef

Source: The Hindu, 6-10-2015

The grand delusion of Digital India

The idea of attacking poverty by increasing mobile connectivity in a country that ranks 55 in the Global Hunger Index is just fantasy

Interviewer: What would you regard as the most outstanding and significant event of the last decade?

Siddhartha: The… war in Vietnam, sir.

Interviewer: More significant than landing on the moon?

Siddhartha: I think so, sir.

— “Pratidwandi” (The Adversary), 1970

The most fundamental debate for our youth is the choice between Android, iOS or Windows. — Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A glib modernity has perpetrated the belief that technology can bring about the liberation of human beings. Therefore, it is not surprising that the post-colonial history of colonised nations is also largely a history of this unrealisable fantasy. Digital India is the latest enchantment. The irony is that what goes missing in the search of a “technological fix” is human beings themselves. What should worry us is not the digital divide, but the fundamental divide between a rapidly growing technological capability and a snail-like growth in eliminating human deprivation.

Mr. Modi’s Digital India speech at Silicon Valley showed his remarkable continuity with the policies of post-independence governments, which grievously ignored the fundamental bases of development, health and education, leading to colossal failures in eliminating deprivation. Is it of any surprise that in 2011, 50 per cent of rural India was illiterate or semiliterate? Or that dengue overwhelms New Delhi now? All this is the result of an impoverished understanding of development as merely economic growth and progress in science and technology, rather than ensuring basic human capacities and dignity. Hence, we are in a conjuncture in which 71 per cent of rural India owns mobile phones while 75 per cent of it lives on Rs. 33 per day.

Nissim Mannathukkaren

Technocratic development

But Mr. Modi’s Digital India adds a crucial distinction: even the fig leaf of palliative attempts made by previous regimes in dealing with the great rural dislocation has been dispensed with. Socialism, which is still formally a part of the Indian Constitution, becomes a dirty word where a market-led vision of society has supposedly triumphed. Thus the substantial reduction of the already abysmal social sector spending, especially in health and education, is not just a policy decision but part of a larger philosophy. The central characteristic of technocratic development is that it is immune to pain; for instance, the agriculture minister attributes farmer suicides to “impotency” and failed “love affairs”.

In the technocratic vision, democracy is a result of technology. That is why for Mr. Modi, “technology is advancing citizen empowerment and democracy, that once drew their strength from Constitutions.” This is a remarkable statement — no democratic revolution in the world has been brought about by technology, but by human beings willing to sacrifice themselves for equality and liberty. Here, technology might be an instrument, just as it might equally be a tool in the hands of oppressors. Perhaps, it is not ironic that in the Information Age, governments and corporations have the most vital information about people’s private and public lives.

Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden threatened global power structures through the power of information technology, but as they were not backed by mass democratic movements, they have been condemned to imprisonment or political asylum. The fact that India has been flooded with more than a billion mobile phones in the last ten years has not made it a deeper or stronger democracy. Technology such as WhatsApp can mobilise people for democratic struggles or to kill a person for eating beef.

Mr. Modi also claims that “we have attacked poverty by using the power of networks and mobile phones to launch a new era of empowerment and inclusion.” The idea of attacking poverty in a country where 50 per cent of the people are still dependent on agriculture and where agriculture grew at 1.1 per cent last year simply by increasing mobile connectivity sounds phantasmic! The gargantuan scale of structural inequities based on class and caste in land ownership, along with the declining public investment in agriculture under neoliberalism, which fuels agrarian distress, is glossed over here.

India’s economy finally grew faster than China’s in 2014. But on a variety of social indicators, it is decades behind China because the latter, as Amartya Sen has repeatedly emphasised, invested heavily in health and education under communism before it turned to market-led growth.

India’s fast growth rates since 1991 have been the product of a privileged few. The benefits too have primarily gone to them. The denouement of Digital India will be no different. But the opacity of technocratic development prevents it from seeing this reality. Thus, the Indian middle class thinks it is really “middle”, having expanded greatly by pulling up vast numbers from the poor classes in the last 25 years. But in a revealing statistic which will prick this delusion, the Pew Research Center points out that in the period from 2001 to 2011, while poverty was reduced both in China and India, the middle class grew from 3 per cent to 18 per cent in China, while it expanded from 1 per cent to 3 per cent in India. Though the measurement of the middle class numbers is contentious, even other assessments, like that of the Center for Global Development, put the number at 5.88 per cent.

The hollowness of Digital India, Start-up India and Make in India cannot ring louder for those who will access the Internet, start business ventures and produce goods, but do not have basic facilities as human beings. India ranked 55 out of 76 countries in the Global Hunger Index last year, behind Nepal. Half of rural India lives in kuccha houses and works as casual manual labour. And these lives are supposedly going to be transformed by the magic wand of broadband access (which stands at 1.2 per cent of the population now).

In the film Pratidwandi, the answers proffered by the protagonist Siddhartha Chowdhury did not bag him the job at the Botanical Survey of India interview. To the utter incredulity of his interviewers, Siddhartha went on to say that the moon landing was remarkable but not unpredictable, given the state of technology. But what was unpredictable about the Vietnam War was “the extraordinary power of resistance” mounted by the poor peasants: “This isn’t a matter of technology; it’s just plain human courage.”

If these answers did not get space in the imagination of the “socialist” India of the 60s, they seem to have been completely banished from the present-day capitalist India. It is time to realise that the future of India is not in the “fundamental debate” about the “choice between Android, iOS or Windows”, as Mr. Modi thinks. It lies in the building of a radically democratic society, which will not sacrifice human beings for technological utopias and which will ensure that the benefits of technology are harnessed in the most socially and ecologically just manner. It is time to believe that Siddhartha’s answers were not obsolete, neither then nor now.

(Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada. Email: nmannathukkaren@dal.ca)

Keywords: Modi in USA, Digital India, Development, Technology, Modi's address to Indian dispora, Modi's Silicon Valley visit, Poverty, Growth, Amartya Sen India vs China, Mobile phone, technocratic development, democracy, Snowden, Start-up India

Source: The Hindu, 6-10-2015

Besides measuring poverty, India should not overlook inequality

For policymakers, it would be heartening to note that India had the lowest poverty rates among countries that housed a large number of poor people.

The bad news, however, is that India also accounted for the largest number of poor people in any country in 2012, a latest World Bank report has said. While varying estimates of poverty muddy the picture, as does a perverse fiscal incentive for states of claiming inflated incidence, India should not miss the larger issue of inequality.

Economists set a poverty line, or a threshold income, to get a headcount of poor people in a country. Households earning below the threshold, or the poverty line, are considered poor.

Different countries have different methods of defining the threshold income, depending on local socio-economic conditions. In India, a couple of years ago, the national poverty line was fixed at Rs 27.2 a day for rural dwellers and Rs 33.3 for those residing in cities. The erstwhile Planning Commission’s estimates, based on the Tendulkar Committee methodology, show that there were 269.7 million people in India — or 21.9% of the population — that live below the poverty line. According to a study by a panel headed by C Rangarajan, former chairman of the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council, there were 363 million people, or 29.5% of India’s 1.2 billion people, who lived in poverty in 2011-12.

The Rangarajan panel considers people living on less than Rs 32 a day in rural areas and Rs 47 a day in urban areas as poor. This World Bank report uses an updated international poverty line of $1.90 a day, incorporating differences in the cost of living across countries as well as country-level living standards data. The new projections suggest that there are 231.3 million poor people in South Asia, down from 309.2 million in 2012. Going by the size, it is only logical to assume that the bulk of these people are living in India.

One of the primary objectives of poverty estimates is to provide subsidised entitlements to the poor. The question is: How does one define the poverty line in India in which old yardsticks may not hold good, either in terms of buying food or defining the poor? Do these statistics accurately measure poverty, and what is the next step in poverty reduction for middle-income countries like India?

Just as a way of an example, it is difficult to argue that a family of five members with an income, of say, Rs 5,000 is poor and another with an income of Rs 5,200 is not. It appears certain that the focus should now shift to reducing inequality. Absolute poverty is an economic concept, but inequality is a sociological construct. On the development priority scale, reducing inequality should be accorded as much priority as clocking higher national income or GDP growth. In the final analysis, it would be foolhardy to ignore that yesterday’s luxuries are today’s necessities.

Source: Hindustan Times, 6-10-2015

bsolute Bliss Is There For The Taking

Abhimanyu Pati





Happiness is generally perceived as a state of mind. It is a reactive state of mind arising out of occurrence of any favourable event happening in the environment. Therefore, it is transient in nature and it exists as long as the memory of this event remains. Hence happiness, triggered by external stimuli, is designated as relative happiness because of its relationship with external events and its temporariness.As the nature of events starts changing, the state of mind also fluctuates in a synchronous manner. Since we do not have any control over external events, our life condition, as dictated by mind, remains unpredictable and we start blaming others for our unhappiness.But we have the ability to remain in a state of paramanand, continuous bliss, if we know how to master the mind and disassociate ourselves from the effects of external events.
Mind, by nature, is extrovert. The existence of mind is because of vishaya chinta, worldly thoughts as explained by Krishna in the Bhagwad Gita. Thoughts give rise to the desire of acquiring worldly objects, including name and fame. Fulfilment of any desire gives happiness and unfulfilled desires result in unhappiness. Therefore, our internal thoughts and desires are responsible for our momentary joy or sorrow.
In Buddhism, there is a concept called “Oneness of life and environment“, which means that the environment consisting of sentient and insentient objects is an extension of individual life states and is a reflection of our life conditions.There is no separateness between individual beings and the environment. All phenomena happening inside ourselves affect the environment and vice versa.This understanding is crucial for seekers of happiness. Compassion is the key .
Our daily activities are predomi nantly driven by selfish desires.Environmental responses are thrown back to us in a negative manner resulting in our suffering. A wise person will act more selfless and dedicated. Krishna calls this Karma Sanyasa, detachment from fruits of actions. These actions create a positively charged environment, which provides a perpetual positive life force resulting in absolute bliss.
One who wants to be com passionate, has to operate from the heart instead of mind. In our present society , this is being perceived as a weakness and people start taking advantage of this situation. However, living a compassionate life is not an impossible proposition, if one is determined to live a peaceful life. A seeker should consistent ly and continuously endeavour to observe and overpower mind with activities directed from the heart instead of mind.
Adi Shankara said that all living beings are “chidananda rupam“, which means that our inherent and intrinsic nature is replete with absolute wisdom, chit and absolute bliss, paramanand.We are part of universal consciousness, sat, the ultimate truth of existence.Despite being in possession of absolute bliss, because of our delusion and ignorance, we are searching for transient happiness from outside. A practitioner should move inward, starting with observing and overpowering mind; operating from heart with compassion; and finally revealing the true nature of Buddhahood.
Absolute bliss is already available within us and there is no need to look for it from outside. Once a seeker experiences the state of absolute bliss, no other transient happiness will be of any relevance to him. Such a person will live in society as a sanyasi or sthitapragnya ­ person of equanimity ­ without being affected by the dualities of life and worldly sufferings.

Brain Drain To Brain Gain

Rahul Kansal





As India extends beyond geographical borders, barriers with NRIs have fallen

Over the past week, we've witnessed anot her breathless public display of affection between Prime Mini ster Narendra Modi and the NRI community . Reproached for years as a self-serving people who deserted the motherland for their own ends, the community is now increasingly feted as proud sons and daughters of India.Censured for having first taken the benefit of subsidised Indian education and then participated in a massive Brain Drain from the country , they are now heralded as the creators of a `Brain Gain' that will power India into a glorious technology-studded future.
It's interesting to observe how our attitudes towards our expatriate brethren have transformed over the past decade or two. Remember Bollywood's portrayal of the NRI of the 60s in films like Purab aur Paschim, where westernised Indian girls chain smoked, and moms who should have been slaving away on sewing machines to pay for their son's education wasted away their hours in swimming pool parties? Clearly , as these ingrates abandoned our shores, they exchanged the virtuous Indian way of life for the materialistic, decadent values of the West.
The 90s witnessed, through films like Dilwale Dulhania and Aa Ab Laut Chalen, an attempt to understand the community and empathise with its dual pressures of blending in with the host country while still staying true to its Indian values. The vastly more sympathetic portrayal, prompted in part by the desire to garner a world market for these films, also reflected changing domestic attitudes towards the community .
Over the last decade, the relationship has entered a whole new chapter. That earlier sense of overseas Indians being a distinct group, separated physically and culturally from the motherland is gone.Far from passing any value judgment on them, films now tend to effortlessly include overseas Indians in the narrative, depicting them as desirable, confident, globetrotting role models.
How has this sea change in attitudes taken place? At a basic level, our seamless acceptance of Indians abroad has been paved by a general change in our attitudes towards money and success. As socialist ideas have given way to market-driven ones and the pursuit of material success is seen as a legitimate goal, the prospect of Indians seeking out their fame and fortune beyond Indian shores hardly seems suspect.
On the contrary , the success of Indians abroad is now triumphantly viewed as a reverse colonialism of sorts.India may have thrown off the yoke of foreign rule in a physical sense seven decades ago, but we are still to fully throw off the yoke emotionally .
Each new announcement of an Indian being appointed to the helm of a leading global company , feels like sweet revenge against two centuries of subjugation. The Indian diaspora spread across the capitals of the world and increasingly making its presence felt there, seems akin to an advance party of a civilisatio nal army set to conquer the word.
In terms of hard economic and political benefits too, the contribution of expat Indians is equally gratifying. India is the world's top recipient of remittances, even though the Indian diaspora is not the largest in the world (China's is more than twice as large) ­ suggesting a greater degree of emotional and cultural connectivity with the homeland. At over $70 billion per annum, the value of remittances from overseas is just 25% less than the Indian government's entire annual Plan Expenditure of $94 billion! The Indian IT boom also owes substantially to the reputation that Indians settled in Silicon Valley have made for themselves as geeks and innovators ­ a prowess celebrated in American popular culture through characters like Asok of the Dilbert comic strip and Raj of Big Bang Theory . This perception has allowed us to steadily move up the IT value chain, from body-shopping in the 80s and 90s to vanilla IT assignments like Y2K, to IT consultancy and new idea centric start-ups making waves globally .
No wonder, then, that concepts like Brain Drain seem so out of sync with the times. As PM Modi rightly observed, the diaspora today seems like a brains trust which can offer a whole lot more gain for the country .
Like in any relationship on the mend, the NRI's view of the homeland also seems to have undergone a sea change in the past decades. A generation ago, the NRI shared a complex love-hate relationship with his motherland, comprising both guilt and a deep resentment of the conditions back home that forced him to leave. Shashi Tharoor described the relationship thus, in a book published in 1997: The attitude of the expatriate to his homeland is like that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has spurned for not having merited his fidelity .
However, with India progressively offering new opportunities after liberalisation, and the West slowing down (precipitously so, after the global financial crisis) we're witnessing a healthy two-way flow of talent.
Indian expats now find it much easier to return to the country , with a shrinking differential in salaries and nearglobal living standards in secluded enclaves in our metros. Conversely Indians today happily explore opportunities overseas without any guilt that they may be seen as deserting the motherland.
Finally , India seems to be extending beyond its physical borders. The tagline India Everywhere used prematurely by a dotcom brand 15 years ago, seems finally to be coming true.
The writer is Executive President, Bennett, Coleman & Company Limited (BCCL)

Source: Times of India, 6-10-2015

Govt plans NCB-like body to check human trafficking

Himanshi Dhawan

New Delhi:





A national authority to combat trafficking along the lines of the Narcotics Control Bureau is on the anvil following initial consultations between the ministries of home affairs and women and child development.While there has been no firm decision on the exact framework of the agency , it is likely that the authority will act as an umbrella organisation addressing aspects of intelligence, investigation, rescue and rehabilitation of human trafficking victims.Human trafficking is under the jurisdiction of the CBI as of now. “We had discussions with the home ministry , NGOs working in the field and several states on the issue of trafficking. In principle, we have taken a decision to establish the agency specialising in trafficking,“ a senior WCD official said.
Recognising trafficking as an organised crime, the government also plans to establish anti-human trafficking units in all districts and issue revised guidelines to states.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UN ODC), human trafficking in South Asia is often referred to as one of the fastest growing transnational organised crimes. Over 1,50,000 people are trafficked within south Asia every year for sex work, labour, forced marriages, organ trade and it is often their economic state and conditions that contribute to the vulnerabilities of young people, women and children.
Countries in South Asia serve as prominent origin, transit and destination countries for women, children and men being trafficked. India acts both as a source and destination with women and children coerced from Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to land up in middle-east and Africa.
Most of the trafficking takes place for commercial sexual exploitation where women are forced into unpro tected sexual acts with multiple partners. In addition, there has been a rise in demand for domestic helps at a time when human labour is becoming expensive. The recent case of two Nepalese women who were allegedly abused and exploited in a Saudi diplomat's Gurgaon residence is an instance of exploitation that caught the headlines.
The decision comes on the back of the Supreme Court directing the government to prepare a comprehensive action plan to tackle human trafficking. The case was filed by the NGO Prajwala.
Following the SC's intervention the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) submitted a report recommending that one unified agency should be created to address concerns.

Source: Times of India, 6-10-2015