Retirement home for prostitutes in Kolkata

As a teenager, Rekha was sold by a relative to a brothel in the Indian city of Kolkata. Over the years, her earnings helped put three brothers back home through school.

Now 75 and bedridden, she lives alone in an unlit hovel, shunned by her family.

Soon, women like Rekha will have a place to go - a retirement home for prostitutes set up by the government in Kolkata, an eastern port city and capital of West Bengal state.

It will be called Muktir Alo, or Light of Freedom.

The path-breaking welfare measure - the first in India - will initially benefit 100 sex workers aged 50 and over, picked via a lottery.

They will be provided with a furnished room, all meals and health care at state expense.

It is the brainchild of two politicians: Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who is known as a champion of underdogs, and Ms Sashi Panja, a former gynaecologist- turned-lawmaker for the Trinamool Congress Party.

The first old-age home for retired prostitutes is housed in a two-storey government building near Charu Market - a nondescript locality not too far away from the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, the playground of the rich and powerful.

The modest home will open next month after the state Cabinet's approval - a formality.

"Everything is in place; we are ready for the launch," Ms Panja told The Straits Times.

Kolkata is home to one of Asia's biggest red-light districts, Sonagachi, where an estimated 10,000 ply their illegal trade daily. The district falls within Ms Panja's Shyampukur constituency in north Kolkata.

Conservative Indians hold prostitutes in utter contempt as carriers of infectious diseases and the source of what they call "moral degradation" in the country.

India's more than three million sex workers lead an ostracised existence in red-light ghettoes of metropolitan cities and towns. Prostitutes earn well by Indian standards but invariably fall upon bad times when they grow old.

In September, the chief minister ordered Ms Panja to conduct a survey to identify prostitutes too old to work so the state could help. The survey found 781 retired prostitutes in Sonagachi and the adjoining Rambagan belt who were unable to fend for themselves.

Many, like Rekha, had turned to begging for survival.

To begin with, though, the government will take only 100 under its wing because its resources are limited.

Ms Roshni Sen, a senior civil servant in charge of the social welfare department, said the state government has sanctioned five million rupees (S$98,000) for the prostitutes' old-age home project in the current financial year.

Once they get more funds, said Ms Sen, the government plans to set up more homes not only in Kolkata but also in districts which have a sizeable number of sex workers.

Conditions in Sonagachi are better than in other red-light areas, though, thanks to the powerful prostitutes' guild called Durbar Mahila Samanawaya Committee. Its unionised members insist on customers using condoms, reducing infection rates to between 5 per cent and 10 per cent, compared to nearly 50 per cent in Mumbai's Kamathipura brothels.

Rekha hopes to find a room at Muktir Alo when it opens next month. "The chief minister understood our plight because like us, she is a woman," she said.

snmabdi@yahoo.com

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