Sold for Rs 3 lakh, held captive in Rajasthan: A girl's six-year ordeal

📌 Summary:

• An Adivasi woman from Jharkhand's Simdega district hopes to reunite with her daughter, who was allegedly trafficked across states as a minor more than six years ago, after an activist began coordinating a rescue with police and Labour department officials

• According to the mother, in 2019 a non-tribal man lured the minor girl "in the name of love", took her to Delhi on the pretext of work, then trafficked her onward — eventually to Rajasthan, where she was "sold for Rs 3 lakh"

• The survivor, now an adult and a mother, told her family she suffered repeated physical violence and rape while confined; she was forced into domestic work by a man running a small hotel business and threatened against contacting her family

• For years there was no contact; the mother did not report the disappearance to police — the activist explained that tribal families often do not report such incidents due to fear, social stigma and lack of access to institutional support; contact resumed only in November via secret phone calls

• The activist said the case exposes systemic failures: weak grassroots awareness and intervention mechanisms, an "administrative gap", and the absence of a coordinated long-term anti-trafficking strategy in tribal regions, calling for investment in grassroots support networks and involvement of tribal leadership

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS1 — vulnerability of Adivasi women and girls, human trafficking and the inter-state nexus, and the social and institutional gaps that allow exploitation of marginalised communities to persist.

🔑 Key Term: Human trafficking — the recruitment, transport, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons through coercion, fraud or deception for the purpose of exploitation, including forced labour and sexual exploitation; constitutionally prohibited under Article 23.