When Priya, 14, was rescued from a family where she was employed, she had bruises all over her body. "I was employed in a family where I was often beaten up, made to work for long hours and sleep on the bathroom floor. I was not allowed to go outside. When my aunt called on, my employer stood near the phone so that I didn't complain," said Priya, who had landed with the family through a placement agency in Delhi.

Many minors like Priya are lured by touts and sold to placement agencies which send them to work in families and commercial establishments. The agencies, which lure minors from remote areas of UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and Nepal, also subject them to sexual abuse. No reliable data is available on the number of such agencies in India. But in Delhi, out of 2,400 agencies supplying domestic help, only 24 are registered. The matter was exposed by an NGO using the Right to Information Act.

Subsequently, around 100 girls employed as domestic help were rescued. Most of the girls were subjected to inhuman treatment, not paid wages, made to work 16 to 18 hours a day and sexually abused. "The placement agencies disregard all norms. Most of them operate through touts who lure children and their parents with a better life. Once they get custody of the children, they send them to work in families, where their suffering begins. In fact, placement is a euphemism for selling children. Poor and illiterate parents often fall into this trap," said Bachpan Bachao Aandolan activist R.S. Chaurasia, who filed the RTI application on the placement agencies.

The agencies operate in places like Sonepat, Gurgaon, Chandigarh, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai and 'give placement' to around 50 to 100 girls and children every month. In July last year, the Delhi government issued a notification asking the placement agencies to register, but except for six agencies, they ignored the directive.

In February, the government told the Delhi High Court that it would form a high-level committee to draft guidelines to prevent trafficking and child labour, but nothing happened.

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