Indian Activist Urmi Basu: Sex Selection Fuels Human Trafficking

Editor's Note: The practice of gender selection, grinding poverty among the people and the stifling caste system have contributed to making India the country with the largest number of human trafficking victims in the world today.

NAM editor Viji Sundaram talked with Urmi Basu, founder and trustee of the Kolkata-based New Light shelter program for prostitutes and their children, while Basu was on a brief visit to California. The trip comes ahead of the U.S. broadcast of the PBS documentary, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which features the work of the activist.

The heart-wrenching film takes the readers to several countries in Africa, Southeast Asia and India where young girls are victims of unspeakable violence, but where too women’s rights activists are providing them opportunities to get back on their feet when they leave their oppressors. The four-hour film was inspired by the widely acclaimed book of the same name by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.

NAM: When and why did you start New Light, and could you...