New Delhi: A 17-year-old girl, who had been subjected to human trafficking, has been awarded Rs 9 lakh as compensation by a district legal services authority in West Bengal — believed to be the highest amount of its kind.
The girl, who was 13 when she was trafficked from Odisha to Kolkata’s red-light area Sonagachi, was rescued that same year — 2016 — by the Kolkata Police. The compensation has been awarded to her under the West Bengal Victim Compensation Scheme.
Nisha Mehroon, who studies and facilitates a programme that targets improvement of India’s victim compensation schemes for survivors of trafficking, said this order was possible due to “previous judgments passed by the Calcutta High Court in the cases of Achiya Bibi and Serina Mondal”.
In 2018, the Calcutta High Court, in response to writ petitions from Bibi and Mondal, passed a judgment in favour of granting compensation to victims. It ordered the West Bengal State Legal Services Authority (SLSA) to pay compensation to a trafficking victim even as the investigation was going on and a trial was yet to begin.
“Those two judgments were instrumental because the SLSA had denied compensation to the survivors on the grounds that the accused traffickers had not been traced or identified, and trial had not commenced,” Mehroon said.
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Denial of compensation is ‘gross inhumanity’
Advocate Kaushik Gupta, a member of Tafteesh, a team of lawyers that provides counsel to trafficked individuals, added: “The Calcutta High Court ruled that the victim of a crime has the right to receive compensation, notwithstanding the result of criminal proceedings, and that denial of compensation would continue to be violation of that right and perpetrate gross inhumanity on the victim.”
A national study on victim compensation titled “compensate victims” by Tafteesh and another organisation Sanjog, released earlier this year, revealed that only 107 out of 38,503 people who were trafficked, as reported by the National Crime Records Bureau between 2010 and 2017, had applied for victim compensation. Only 77 of these had received compensation.
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