Sex-trafficking is India's third-largest underhanded industry...

India has 20 million commercial sex workers, of whom 16 million are victims of sex trafficking (Reuters).
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‘Placement agencies’ in Delhi and Mumbai lure tribal women from Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, promoting them as ‘black diamond’ beauties; there are over 500 such ‘placement agencies’ in Delhi alone, police say.

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A minor girl goes missing every 55 minutes in MP (per NCRB); 9,407 girls and 36,000 women were reported missing in 2021 alone.
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In Gujarat, 41,621 women went missing between 2016 and 2020 (NCRB).

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Legal Services India estimates that 4 girls enter sex work every hour in India, 3 of 4 against their will.

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Per a 2021 report by the International Labour Organization (ILO), 8 million people are trapped and subjected to human trafficking in India. Of these, 4 million are children who are forced into the sex trade.

Activists believe the number of women and minors being trafficked runs into hundreds of thousands. This is corroborated by several NGOs. Even UN bodies, including the International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded in a 2021 report that 8 million people are trapped in human trafficking in India, and that half of these are children who are forced into the sex trade. Even the Lok Sabha Secretariat in its reference notes has identified trafficking for sex as being the third-largest money spinner in India after arms and drugs.

According to a Reuters study from 2019, there were an estimated 20 million commercial sex workers in India, of whom 16 million women and girls were victims of sex trafficking. Legal Services in India estimates that every hour, four girls in India enter sex work, of which three are doing so against their own will.

With technology reshaping sex trafficking and making it more difficult to track, agencies now find it more difficult to locate the operators. The kingpins behind this trade are seldom caught. Human trafficking is a billion-dollar business and it has become more entrenched in India during the last decade, activists believe.

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