In a shocking repetition of the shame exposed in February, ten students of a centrally sponsored school run exclusively for dalit, tribal and backward caste girls in one of Bihar’s poorest districts were once again found to have been forced into the flesh trade.
The adolescent girls engaged in flesh trade in a red-light area close to the Indo-Nepal border in Araria district were among the 24 students of the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidhayalaya (KGBV) at Simraha in Forbesganj block who were reported to be missing for the past five years, police officials said. The recurrence of such appalling incidents and the whole operations behind them, they said, seem to be the handiwork of an inter-state sex racket.
In February, five of the 25 minor girls arrested in a police raid at a fair in Forbesganj holding patently nude dance shows were identified as students of this school, who were found to be working in a nearby red-light area. This particular school, run by an NGO, was also in the news in 2010, when four of its students were rescued from a red light area in Forbesganj. In fact, reports of some the school’s students, mostly hailing from poor families, going missing have been surfacing since 2007.
A four-member team of policemen constituted by Araria’s proactive SP Shivdeep Waman Lande for tracking down the missing schoolgirls found these ten girls on Friday. It was Lande who had conducted the raids in February that led to the identification of the five schoolgirls engaged in sex trade.
“These girls were forced into the flesh trade. We are currently probing the role of an NGO, Apne Aap, which runs the school,” said Lande on Sunday. The rest of the missing schoolgirls, he suspected, could also be in the flesh trade. “Our efforts to trace them all are on,” he added.