- Sunday, March 09, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
In a shocking revelation, the National Human Rights Commission of India has said that young girls are being sold in the north-western state of Rajasthan as “repayment” for loans their parents cannot afford.
According to a report by The Guardian, the human rights body has issued a notice to the government of the state seeking a police probe and answers within a month over what it described an “abominable” practice.
In a practice followed in many rural parts of India, people borrow money from fellow villagers when they are in serious need of money, including for treatment for family members that have fallen sick.
Local media reports have said that in many districts around the district/city of Bhilwara in Rajasthan, a creditor goes to the “caste panchayats” or caste councils to complain about a family if it fails to repay a loan.
The council is accused of asking the family to hand over their daughter(s) as a way of “settlement” so that the creditor could sell her/them off to traffickers to get the money back.
This is not all. If a family refuses to sell the daughter, “their mothers are subjected to rape on the diktats of caste panchayats for the settlement of disputes,” the commission said in the notice.
One of the cases that came to fore said that a man, who borrowed Rs 1.5 million (£15,800) from a neighbour, was forced to sell his sister and 12-year-old daughter to settle the debt.
In another instance, the panchayat forced a man, who borrowed Rs 600,000 (£6,300) for his sick wife’s treatment, to hand over his younger daughter to the creditor. The commission said that she was sold to a trafficker in Agra and thereafter, “she was sold three times and became pregnant four times”.
The panel sent an official to the state to probe the issue.
Ashish Modi, the district collector of Bhilwara, said such crimes were the first of their kind.
“They are total illegal. The police are investigating and we will make sure the victims get justice and the guilty are punished,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
Panchayats are often accused of acting as kangaroo courts. In the past, there have been instances of them ordering honour killings of couples who married into a different caste or religion or brutal punishments for couples suspected of indulging in adultery.
