GUWAHATI: Many young women from the northeast, pushed into illegal trades with the promise of jobs in big cities, are now languishing in jails in other parts of the country despite being granted bail — because there is no one to bail them out.“Parents of many of these girls live in remote areas of the northeast, are poor, illiterate or unreachable because of lack of connectivity,” Robin Hibu, special commissioner of Delhi Police, said. Hibu is the founder of HHS, working for the safety of people from the northeast in New Delhi.“It is painful to see girls rotting in jails, abandoned by the society. An NGO, Helping Hands Society (HHS), is fighting these cases in courts, but the courts want those who bail them out to be from the states of their origin,” Hibu said, adding that he has often reached out to people from the northeast living in these cities to volunteer as bailers.Recently, a 26-year-old woman from Nagaland was released from a prison in Noida. Police had arrested her from the Gomti area during a raid on a spa, allegedly in the flesh trade. “I came here last year after a placement agency in Delhi promised me a job as a beautician at a high-end parlour. I was asked to join as an intern a day before I was arrested,” she said.It also came to light recently that at least 10 women from the northeastern states are waiting to be released. Some of them from Manipur and Nagaland were nabbed from a fake call centre of greater Noida, where they were working. The courts had granted them bail, but because of a lack of bailers, they could not be released.Many such youths, seeing no hope, have committed suicide. “Even in death, there is no dignity. The bodies of these youths are kept for days on end at the mortuary with no one to claim them,” Hibu said.The HHS has demanded the state governments of the region to activate their state houses in Delhi and other cities to appoint welfare officials for regular interaction and monitoring of northeastern youth working in private sectors in those cities.

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