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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Drought-led migration is making girls prey to trafficking in Andhra Pradesh's Kadiri, pushing town towards HIV/AIDS -TS Sudhir

Drought-led migration is making girls prey to trafficking in Andhra Pradesh's Kadiri, pushing town towards HIV/AIDS -TS Sudhir

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published Published on May 30, 2017   modified Modified on May 30, 2017
-Firstpost.com

Dr Mano Ranjan has been working at the Institute of Infectious Diseases situated on the Anantapur-Kadiri Road in Andhra Pradesh since 2009. This is the premier institute for the entire Rayalaseema region (southern Andhra Pradesh) for those suffering from HIV/AIDS. Dr Ranjan gets 25 new HIV/AIDS patients every day. "It is a ticking time bomb," he says.

Thirty percent of the cases are from hamlets in and around Kadiri, unarguably the HIV/AIDS capital of Andhra Pradesh. The hospital has 26,000 plus registered cases, 8,000 of whom are widows. It is shocking that most of the victims are in the age group of 25 to 40. Another 3,000 cases are children born most often to an HIV-positive parent.

"If we do not put in any efforts to stop this situation (the spread of HIV/AIDS), in the future, we will have a common population in Kadiri that is HIV positive, particularly among the widows and separated, and divorced women," says Dr Ranjan.

The solution, however, does not lie in mere awareness about safe sex practices. Unlike agrarian distress that leads to farmer suicides, like in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telangana, Kadiri presents an even more complicated problem. It's one drought and unemployment leading to an HIV-AIDS scare.

Connecting the dots

Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh sees the second lowest rainfall in India after Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, with an annual average rainfall of less than 600 mm. Only 10 percent of the drought-hit district is cultivated-area-under-irrigation (1 lakh out of 11 lakh hectares) but, the district is home to 90 percent small and marginal farmers (6.3 lakh out of 7 lakh).

With no agricultural work and no other means of employment, migration from Anantapur is the only way out. It is estimated that close to five lakh people, which comes to around 10 percent of Anantapur's population, have moved out, a majority of them in the last three years. The reason for that is that the last five years have seen successive severe droughts, reducing Anantapur to a bowl of dust.

What makes this exodus into a human tragedy is that the children are often left behind, some as young as five years old with hundreds of them being teenage girls. A survey by a group of seven NGOs in May revealed that over 1,000 children have been left behind by their parents in 26 hamlets, most of them in and around Kadiri. The emotional trauma of the young ones — having to fend for themselves, sleeping on an empty stomach and being deprived of a parent's love and affection — is unimaginable. Only a few have aged grandparents to look after them.

In Kadiri, both emotional and physical security are at risk. This is because vultures in the form of brokers and pimps are always on the look out for fresh prey. Poverty, deprivation, backwardness and low literacy (at 57 percent, Kadiri's literacy rate is lower than the national average) have made this area hugely vulnerable to trafficking over the years. A large number of women and children from Kadiri end up in brothels in Goa, Delhi and Kolkata.

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Firstpost.com, 28 May, 2017, http://www.firstpost.com/india/drought-led-migration-makes-girls-prey-to-trafficking-pushes-andhra-pradeshs-kadiri-towards-hivaids-3490063.html


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