Kolkata: A 26-year-old Bangladeshi woman, who had been trafficked to Delhi five years ago, was finally repatriated and reunited with her family at the border on Tuesday. Bangladesh and India govts, which had taken help of Bengal Ham radio enthusiasts and the authorities of a shelter home in Beliaghata, where the woman was brought, undertook a joint initiative to send her back home.
A resident of Narayanganj and a class-IX pass-out, the woman was falsely promised a job and taken to Delhi by a friend and two others, who were later found to be Bangladeshi touts. She was pushed into flesh trade and was sent to a brothel near Delhi’s Faridabad-Badarpur Batra hospital, where she was regularly tortured physically and mentally.
According to her family, the woman was 21 years old when she went missing. “She was cooking at home and I had gone out. When I returned, I could not find her but did not realize she had gone missing. Once we realised what had happened, we started searching for her and we continued to look for her for four long years,” said her mother. In all these years, her father passed away. “Even police could not get us any information.We had lost all hopes. Finally, we found her again.”
Pampa Patra, supervisor of Shelter for Urban Homeless at Beliaghata, a state-affiliated home, told TOI, “The woman was suffering from memory loss when she was brought to our home. But following treatment and therapy, she managed to narrate her ordeal and I contacted Ambarish Nag Biswas, secretary of West Bengal Radio Club, to send her back home to Bangladesh.”
It was Nag Biswas who sent the woman’s photos to Ham radio operators across Bangladesh to search for her family. WBRC members traced her family to Bangladesh and also contacted the commissioner of Delhi Police crime branch following which the three accused—the woman trafficker and the two touts—were arrested.
The WBRC team made an appeal to the ministry of home affairs of the two countries and the Bangladesh High Commission to make a legal arrangement to reunite the woman with her family.