Chandigarh, July 9
A report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) has blamed Haryana’s skewed sex ratio for large-scale trafficking of girls from other states for forced marriages and ‘bonded’ labour into the state.

The assessment report, “Current Status of Victim Service Providers and Criminal Justice Actors in India on Anti-Human Trafficking-2013”, states: “There’s a large-scale trafficking of girls from the North-East. These girls are being brought to Haryana for forced marriage and bonded labour.

Karnal, Mewat, Rewari, Kurukshetra, Jind, Yamuna Nagar and Hisar are some destinations where these girls are taken to.”

The shortage of brides in villages and towns of Haryana and Punjab is often met by these “on sale” poverty stricken women, says the report.

In many cases, traffickers lure the girls on the pretext of marriage and later sell them in Delhi, it adds.

While most women forced into marriage were from Assam and West Bengal, girls, often minors, from Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh were being trafficked for domestic work.

On the dubious role of the placement agencies providing domestic help, the reports says that mainly Delhi-based agencies supply children for domestic help in Haryana. Once these children land up in their employer’s house, they are virtually kept as bonded labour. There have been many instances where these children were sexually exploited.

The report asserts that in the last five years (2007-12), many sex rackets have been busted by the police. Quoting figures, it says as per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 2,625 children have been missing in Haryana since 2006. Of these, 1,016 are girls. A total of 4,731 persons went missing in which there were 2,075 women.