Why Gujarat has turned a blind eye to Vaidya village where prostitution is tradition

Every morning, men of Vaidya village in north Gujarat’s Banaskantha district head to the Palanpur Tharad highway. They queue up on the highway not in search of work but to solicit truck drivers, passersby, men from neighbouring villages and cities as customers for women of their village.

For decades, Vadia village, inhabited by people of Saraniya tribe, has been forcing women into prostitution while men do nothing apart from looking for customers. Having accepted the work as their fate, most women prepare their daughters and sisters to take up the job after them without any qualms.

While some women have fled to avoid being pulled into sex work over the years, poverty and lack of development continue to stay put in the village.

The women’s cries for help have, however, fallen on deaf administrative ears.

In 2016, 20-year-old Sonal Chauhan, escaped Vadiya to reach a Nari Sanrakshan Gruh in Odhav, Ahmedabad. In August the same year, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Ahmedabad, Sonal wrote a letter to the PM.

“I belong to Vadia village. My current address is the Nari Sanrakshan Gruh in Odhav area of Ahmedabad. You must have heard of my village Vadiya, it is 70 kilometres from Palanpur on the highway from Palanpur to Tharad. Even though my village’s name is disreputed, every single night many reputed and well-known people visit my village. Sometimes, they even come in cars with red beacons.

My work is to satisfy my customers. My grandmother and my mother also did the same work, and if I happen to have a daughter in the future, possibly she would also be forced to do the same work. Since I’m talking about my daughter, I also want to let you know that my mother accepted this profession thinking that it is her fate, a decision which I never approved of, which is why I have run away from my home. I’m not going to do this ‘dhandha’ any more.

I wanted to go to school, I wanted to study, I wanted to play, but that was not in my destiny. I remember when I still used to play 'Ghar Ghar' in the courtyard of my house and one day I started menstruating. A few days later, my mother told me that dhandhe par baithna padega (I will have to start sex work). I used to cry, and I would refuse but I was beaten up every time I refused.

Can you imagine how these men treated me when their only concern was to extract the full value of the money they had paid? In my village, this happens every day. And I'm not the only girl in my village. I have friends, I have sisters, and each one of them is into the same dhando. I hope they can be helped. I am requesting you to save them.”

Seven years since that letter, many Sonals remain stuck in Vaidya ‘serving’ customers, stifling the many dreams they have.

Most children in the village are born as a result of the sex work and they do not know who their fathers are. Men from other villages do not marry the women of Vaidya. If women from the village marry men from Vaidya, they go out to find customers for their wives. In a village, where there is no other means to survive, women get between Rs 500 to Rs 2,500 per customer.

The push and pull of poverty

The men of the Saraniya community, a denotified nomadic group (DNT) of 50,000, were part of various armies prior to independence owing to their knife and sword sharpening skills. The Saraniya women used to be entertainers for the local warlords in Gujarat and neighbouring state of Rajasthan, a profession that ceased to exist after Independence.

Around the year 1963-64, the Saraniya were given 200 acres of land by the Indian government to provide for a better means of income but lack of water sources in an arid region made farming impossible for them. As a result, the onus of running the family expenses fell on the women. With no other way to earn, the women entered flesh trade one by one, till the entire village became of hub of sex work.

“Land was given to the 13 sisters of the Saraniya Stree Sahakari Mandali, which now has 40 members. It is believed that there were 13 sisters who migrated from Chittorgarh to Gujarat and the Saraniya tribe began from them,” said Mittal Patel, founder of Vicharta Samuday Samarthan Manch (VSSM), an NGO that works for nomadic, denotified tribes in Gujarat.

Government apathy

A depilated muddy road leads to Vadiya, a village that has remained isolated for decades. The village is tucked in an arid, draught-ridden corner of Banaskantha where water scarcity is a perennial issue. What has made things even more difficult for the village is that people from other nearby villages have ostracised Vaidya. They have no social, cultural or financial engagements with the locals of Vadiya.

A primary school, which opened only after the intervention of various NGOs, runs from a shabby one-room building at one end of Vadiya and caters to about 180 students. While girls are pushed into sex trade, boys are encouraged to study and even to leave homes to go live in hostels and shelter homes in Tharad, a town about 30 kilometres away, or Palanpur the district headquarters.

“It’s a place of secrecy and isolation and has remained without any development for years in contrast to rest of the district. At district level meetings that are convened to bring development in Vadiya, majority of the officers come with a prejudice. Their approach towards Vadiya has been one of sheer apathy and unwillingness to attempt to change anything,” Mittal Patel told The Federal.

“When we proposed construction of a proper road to the village in 2015, the then district administration said if a road is made it would make it easier for people to reach Vadiya and the problem of sex trade will become worse,” she adds.

The village still awaits a proper road in the absence of which the villagers do not venture out unless extremely necessary. Bad roads also prove to be a hazard during medical emergencies, especially for pregnant women who are forced to pay extremely high prices to commute to the nearest hospital in Unjha, about 100 kilometres from the village.

In the year 2006, after an NGO reached the District Rural Development Agency to avail loan for some families who wished to do farming, the authorities found that the villagers of Vadiya did not feature in BPL list hence were not eligible for any assistance.

Later, the collector asked officials of the civil supplies department to issue Antyodaya ration cards to the villagers, whereas the rural development authorities were asked to begin the process of including the names of these families in the BPL list to process vocational loans for them. This was the first time any initiative was taken by the Banaskantha district authority for Vadiya village.

“Once the ration cards were issued, for years, successive district administrations did not bother to start any more developmental work in Vadiya until 2011,” Patel said.

Between 2010 and 2011, a road form Vadgaum, a neighbouring village to Vadiya was constructed and two borewell connections were installed to facilitate farming and drinking water for the arid region. However, the power bills weren’t paid and the supply to one was discontinued while the other was rendered non-functional because of a landslide after an earthquake.

“We arranged for the pending bill to be paid and restarted one borewell. The second borewell is yet to be repaired through,” she added.

In 2022, when the election commission announced the assembly polls for Gujarat, it said that an awareness programme would be carried out in ‘red light areas’. However, no such programme was held in Vadiya village, neither did any candidate visit the village for campaigning.

“This is not new. We are always ignored during elections. We heard loudspeakers and campaign slogans from neighbouring villages but no one ever comes here,” said Hiren Saraniya, a 65-year-old local.

Noticeably, Vadiya and Vadgamda villages fall under one group panchayat. While Vadgamra has roads, drinking water facility and a functional primary health centre, Vadiya only has hopelessness. Vadiya does not even have a public health centre (PHC) and the nearest PHC is in Tharad around 30 km away.

The administration, however, claims Vadiya is getting its due.

“The group sarpanch had visited both the villages to see if locals have voter identification card ahead of 2022 polls. Just that all the voting booths were in Vadgamra,” said Varun K Barnaval, the district collector of Banaskantha.

“The government has always attempted to bring changes in Vadiya be it social or infrastructure. The administration has tried giving farming incentives from time to time to locals of Vadiya,” he added.

The reality on the ground spills water on the claims of collector Barnaval.

In Vadiya, people still have to buy drinking water from government tankers that supplies water two times a day. There are no vegetable vendors on the streets, and just two basic ration shops.

“We made several representations to the state government for irrigation facilities, but no one heard us,” shares Joni Sarania, a resident of Vadiya.

Finding freedom in marriages

In March 2012, the village witnessed its first mass marriage ceremony that many hoped would be a harbinger to a new life for women of Vadiya.

It was the courage of a teenaged girl of Vadiya who refused to join the age-told tradition and her dogged determination to persuade her family that changed the course of history for not just her but for other women of her village.

Hemi Saraniya, who had just turned 18 then, rebelled against her family when she was asked to step into her mother’s shoes.

“Our father, who was a community elder was enraged as Hemi had said no to his diktat. However, the situation was settled when he was offered money by a NGO to not force Hemi to take up the trade,” Hemi’s brother Himesh told The Federal.

“The NGO proposed marriage instead and Hemi along with 10 other girls of the village got married that day. They are all living very different lives today,” he added.

Not everyone was happy though at the proposal of marrying the young girls.

“The men who earn by pimping their women were quite angry. There were even threatening phone calls and messages,” said Sharadaben, one of the many social workers who have been working for the upliftment of Saraniya women.

“The event took place over three days amid heavy police protection. In fact, the event woke up the government too. JB Vora, the then Banaskantha district collector and other government officials attended the ceremony which was encouraging,” she added.

Since 2012, every year four to five mass marriages have been held in Vadia and the situation has begun to improve for the community but at a snail’s pace. Eleven years after the first mass marriage, there are several couples from Vadiya who have sought to leave the village to live lives of dignity. For those who remain, the nightmare of selling their bodies to meet basic expenses continues.