One Peculiar Train Experience | The Job Human Trafficking Racket in India
Table of Contents
TLDR - Summary
This post recounts my unusual train journey from Howrah to Bhubaneswar. It details an encounter with a peculiar co-passenger, a woman who seemed lost and was possibly a victim of human trafficking. This post describes the woman’s interactions with the Train Ticket Examiner (TTE) and reflects on the broader issues of job migration and human trafficking in India. Conclusion
The story concludes without a resolution, as I disembark at Bhubaneswar (BBS) and don’t learn the fate of the woman or whether the TTE’s suspicions were confirmed. The post and the story however, highlights the vulnerabilities of migrant workers and the systemic issues that facilitate human trafficking.
Background
Where
On a train, on the route: Howrah - Bangalore
When
One fine August, 2024
What
The train was 4 hours late, disrupting my day and giving me a stiff neck and back from sitting and waiting all day.
When I finally got up, it was even more painful on my berth, as more sitting awaited me among an equally tired crowd in the same predicament as myself.
Sitting with me, however, was a woman who caught my attention. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was—maybe her overall “I’m completely lost, but I can’t be obvious about it” vibe, or the fact that she looked different from everyone else in my AC coach, including myself. She frankly didn’t look well off at all…
This one is about her.
Experience
Part 1 - Peculiar Co-Passenger
She boarded with me in Howrah, and as things settled down, I noticed the man with her gave her a phone and coached her on what to say as her name when the TTE asked.
He left after a quick “Are you afraid?” directed at her in an attempt to reassure her. This gave me the impression that she was a first-time solo traveler. I assumed the man had a ticket for a different coach, as often happens when tickets aren’t booked together, and he went to his respective coach.
My stop, BBS, didn’t cover the entire route the train would take, not even half of it. I would reach in a few hours, barring delays, so I refrained from ordering food. The other guy beside me ate his lunch and then went to his upper berth.
Mine was the middle berth, and although I wanted to rest, I had to wait for my co-passenger, the woman I’ve been describing so far, to decide to rest as well so I could have my berth.
However, she had different plans. She was just sitting there. Just sitting. It’s rare to find someone sitting idle in today’s age of smart distractions. I went to the washroom, not particularly worried because I had light luggage. When I returned, I saw that she had picked up all her luggage from the floor and covered the seat with it.
She was now taking up half the seat with herself and her multiple cloth and jute bags (jhola and bora). Well, I guess half a berth is still more space than a chair car, like my last experience. She was particularly worried about her luggage. Even in a comparatively safer AC coach, she told the other passengers to watch her luggage for her when she went to the washroom.
Part 2 - Co-passenger Gets into Trouble
The TTE arrives and asks her name, which she answers as she was instructed by the man.
The TTE looks at her and asks for her ID, just to be sure. Her ticket, as it happens, was under the senior citizen quota. The TTE said they are directed to check IDs for passengers with senior citizen tickets. She looked too young to be a senior citizen.
Since she didn’t have an ID to show the TTE, she called her ‘brother’ the man, who said he would send the Aadhar shortly.
The TTE continued his duty in the rest of the coach and the train. He told her he would be back and would have to charge her a fine and ask her to get off if she couldn’t present a valid ID.
Part 3 - Reflections on the Rail System
At this point, I started to wonder about it. It seemed like there was some funny business after all.
TTEs are very skilled, in my opinion. In a coach full of passengers, they can identify potential scams. Such cases are not uncommon. One could argue that the Rail System in India is completely incompetent. People’s lives depend on traveling, especially in emergencies. What else can one do but try to ‘bend the rules’?
Traveling during festive seasons is particularly troublesome, as certain busy routes get fully booked months in advance. I often find my usual routes from Bengal to Bihar completely booked half a year ahead of ‘chhath’, with waiting lists going over 200.
One could argue that using ‘dalals’ or brokers to bypass this isn’t morally wrong at all. What can one do in an emergency when no tickets are available? Buying tickets on the black market or traveling without one are the only two options.
But I argue that these dalals aggravate the already existing problem. These rackets are part of the reason people can’t get a ticket. Buying tickets en masse with different names and ages to sell them on the black market only reduces the number of already scarce tickets available.
It’s difficult to round them up. Buying a bunch of tickets isn’t illegal after all.
This is what I, and I think the TTE as well, assumed was the case with the woman at first.
Part 4 - The Job Migrations
It is a problem in Bengal, as I cite a recent report: “WB loses 3 million informal jobs in the last 7 years,” the highest of any state. It is generally the poor, the economically backward classes who do unskilled informal jobs, which the educated classes of society would rather avoid with the help of education and formal jobs.
Much like how educated youth flock to big metropolitan cities such as Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Delhi, Gurugram, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad after graduating, uneducated youths also move to these cities to look for informal jobs.
It’s not formally accounted for, but based on testimonies and circumstantial evidence, a huge migration occurs for the informal sector, similar to the formal ones.
I’ve had friends speak of finding a Bengali bartender in Chennai, a Bengali repair shop in Bhubaneswar, or a Nepali momo stall in my own hometown.
We’ve all heard of the Nithari incident. Nithari is one of many such areas throughout the country, in every metropolitan city—in this case, Noida—where people from poorer states like West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar flock in such numbers that they form their own colonies. These are pockets of migrants.
Part 5 - Stalling
The TTE returned and asked if her brother had sent her ID yet. Earlier, the man had called the woman and told her to tell the TTE, “my brother is fetching the ID and will send it shortly.” When she asked if he had not sent any ID yet, the man gave a strange reply. He said that although he had sent an ID, it would be better not to show it to the TTE, and he was trying to change the name on an ID and send that instead.
The TTE returned and asked her to show her ID again. The woman did not know how to use WhatsApp, so she asked one of the co-passengers to open her WhatsApp and show the ID to the TTE. The co-passenger, a middle-aged man, helped her with that. The TTE saw the “ID” that was sent, and it turned out to be just the ticket, not an ID.
I reckon the man did this because he did not want to panic the woman by admitting that he had no ID to send.
His plan was to play dumb and stall the ID check.
I wondered how far it would get her though. Getting all the way through to Bangalore seemed unlikely to me. The train did not have frequent stops en route; in fact, it had 5 stops on a 2000km long one-way trip. So stalling just one station would carry her 400km before she could be forced to get off.
She might as well get sympathy. An alone, helpless woman being stranded in an unknown location would be a difficult decision for the TTE to make.
Part 6 - The Trafficking Racket
It was at this point that I, and I assume the TTE with me, started to consider the possibility of human trafficking.
Think about it, a woman traveling in AC class to Bangalore to work menial odd jobs. She appeared so helpless, clueless about trains, and was evidently a villager through her accent. She was unread and couldn’t even speak a word of Hindi. The way she used the phone given to her made it clear it wasn’t natural to her. She would be completely lost in the city, but for the man…
My Reflections
The man was probably her employer. This seems like one of those rings where they round up broke laborers from poor states, sell them the dream of money and a better life, and then supply them en masse elsewhere. There, they toil away their lives, never able to return, and are quite at the mercy of their employers, as they would be lost in the place they now find themselves working.
Such an employer can make them work even without a salary, by just giving them meals to keep them alive. What can someone in her position even do? Even if she found a way to get to the police and communicate with them, it would be pointless.
Of course, the police are always in on rackets, every single time. The big pimps running the rackets always have the local thana in their pockets. Local thanas everywhere are always sold off to either the local ruling party or the local big pimps, and it continues to be so until something blows completely out of proportion and catches national public attention. Even then, nothing really happens in certain parts of the country, such as Sandeshkhali, Dinajpur.
This topic deserves its own article.
The stories she must have been fed likely included how she would earn a lot of money and how this would improve her and her family’s life. I say this because these are the stories fed to Indians who reach Arabia, only to do menial construction, cleaning, and assistant/clerk jobs, and get stranded there for life due to a lack of money to send home or even return home.
Slave labor is well-documented in places like Dubai, where people (especially from South India) arrive with big dreams and high hopes, only to find out they have to sign a contract that says they must work a certain number of years before they can return home.
The Ending?
Well, I got off at BBS and didn’t get the chance to see if the TTE returned, or the man, or whether she reached Bangalore, or what became of her. But in any case, this was my one memorable journey from home to college at the beginning of a new term.