Aura of Singularity

Pallabi Ghosh: Influencer for Justice

In social media parlance that we all seem to understand nowadays, an “influencer” is someone who has the trust of the consumer for certain selected brands of products. They usually command platoons of followers and are paid well by brand companies. Looking at my social media feeds, Pallabi Ghosh, a thirty-something Indian woman could easily be identified as such. She is always smiling and her posts are full of her travels, daily and for months at a time, to urban metropolises, rural hamlets, shiny railway stations and dirt roads, traveling as she does by three-wheeler scooters for hire, bullock carts, cycle rickshaws, trains, buses, and on rare occasions, by plane. What she is “selling” is something that is hardly breathed about in India (and the world over) ---awareness of human trafficking.

I met Pallabi ---and I use the term “met” loosely as we have not met in person as yet---through phone conversations and Zoom calls when she wanted to volunteer some of her time mentoring young people in India in soft skills through an NGO that I work with in India. Pallabi, I realized, is always “on the job” and she is unceasingly searching for new audiences. Let me say now that I have not met anyone in my life quite like Pallabi. I’ve met many people who are mission-driven in human welfare organizations but no one of Pallabi’s generation.

(Photo courtesy of Pallabi Ghosh)

Born in Lumding, Assam, about five hours east of Guwahati, the state capital, and looking toward the Kohima Hills on the Burma (now Myanmar) border. A Bengali (her father is from West Bengal and her mother is from Assam), Pallabi grew up in Assam with regular trips to villages just outside of Kolkata to visit relatives. Her “origin” story about how she became aware of human trafficking started on one of these trips when she was twelve. A man in a village that she was visiting was walking around bereft saying that his daughter had disappeared. How could a child disappear in a village where everyone knew everyone else? That led to her researching and discovering the monstrous underbelly of human trafficking and poverty in India.

In 2022, official Indian records list 6, 622 human trafficking cases. However, US State Department reports that according to the Ministry of Labour and Employment’s annual report, there are about eight million Indians estimated to be in bonded labor. The ministry in its report has stated that the government had identified and rescued only 3,13,962 people since 1976.

Those who are trafficked invariably are poor, marginalized, and desperate. They are lured with promises for love, work, marriage, money for organ donors. The burgeoning ready-made clothes industry in a country of 1.3 billion people screams for cheap labor and children are abducted to work in “factories” churning out these goods for intermediaries and brokers. The poor are always looking for a better life. When you are hungry, you’ll do anything to quell that hunger. Pallabi tells an anecdotal story about hearing young kids speak fluent Hindi in an Assam train station (for foreigners: regional languages do not often cross state borders in India). She found out that these children were from northern India, thousands of miles away. Pubescent girls are sold to aging and developmentally challenged men in faraway states. Debts are cleared by selling a daughter or pinioning a son to servitude.

In Pallabi’s relentless travels she has faced threats to her life and well-being. The stakes are extremely high. Billions of rupees are at stake. Brothels in metropolises are only a few miles away from the houses of Parliament in India’s capital city. It has been so as long as I can remember. The name of the street is synonymous with it being the “red-light” area. Pallabi, rightly, is not forthcoming about her procedural strategies and tactics. She collaborates with local informers, police, and numerous tips. The fact that she maintains her mental and physical health is testament to her close-knit family. She’s married and lives with her partner in a southern city.

Pallabi graduated in 2012 with an English Literature degree from one of Delhi University’s leading colleges. While an undergraduate, she joined the NSS (National Service Scheme), a national youth organization with a Gandhian ideal of orienting young college students to community service. After a Master’s in Gender Studies, she worked for a number of NGOs, where she says she learnt the daily procedural work for anti-trafficking.

In 2020, Pallabi founded Impact and Dialogue Foundation that works toward rehabilitation of those being rescued. The Foundation’s focus is on Assam and the Northeast. With additional funding and growth, Pallabi hopes to reach other states. This is where Pallabi is the true revolutionary. She doesn’t think that returning an uneducated teenager to her father is rehabilitation. For Pallabi it means being able to lead an independent life free from bondage---economic and social. The Foundation has yet to get official authorization to receive funds from outside India (see below for details) and Pallabi is a whirling dervish speaking at hundreds and hundreds ( and this is no exaggeration, as any Google search will show) venues ---schools, colleges, panels, social welfare departments, panchayats (village councils), YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter on trafficking, menstrual hygiene, gender-based violence, female feticide, genital mutilation, dowries (which are illegal under the law but openly flouted), domestic violence, child marriage, child abuse, LGBTQI rights.  She is known as Kahaniwali Didi (storyteller sister), sharing real-life stories, and speaking the straightforward language of what she encounters.

(Photo courtesy of Pallabi Ghosh)

As with all committed changemakers, Pallabi doesn’t keep a spreadsheet with how many direct rescues she’s organized. Reports vary from five to over ten thousand. She puts her consulting fees into the foundation and when she has people who are interested in volunteering or interning, she provides for food and travel.

Pallabi means new leaf. A new beginning. And that is what she is attempting to do for the most vulnerable on the subcontinent.

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