About Ruchira Gupta

This is how Ruchira is a Changemaker:
I made a documentary, The Selling of Innocents on sex-trafficking from the villages of Nepal to the brothels of Mumbai which was one of the first to establish the link between trafficking and prostitution. It depicted the entire chain from the local village procurer, to the transporter, to the corrupt border guard, to the agent, the lodgekeeper, the brothel-owner, the brothel manager, the pimp and the money lender who ran the flesh trade and pushed little girls into prostitution. This documentary was used in the passage of the US Trafficking Victim Protection Act and the UN Protocol on Trafficking, both of which subsequently defined trafficking as a process and prostitution its outcome. The documentary was also dubbed into six-langauges and shown in villages to prevent families from letting their daughters be seduced or coerced. I also set up a membership-based organziation of trafficked women which is now more than five thousand strong aclled Apne Aap women Worldwide. We organize the women into small self help groups or cooperatives in red-light areas across India and establish community centres which help these groups with legal protection, education, income-generation training and links to markets. I have also helped Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Pghilippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Kosovo develop national plans of action against trafficking as anti-trafficking expert for USAID. I have also worked with UNICEF to develop child protection and women's empowerment policies in USA and Iran. Most recently, I have written two manuals for police and prosecutors in collaboration with UNODC to train on addressing the deman dfor trafficking. We are at present lobbying for a chang ein Indian law to penalize the trafficker and not the victim.

The place for which Ruchira feels a fondness or connection:
I am very fond of a small village in Bihar, India called Forbesgunge. It is on the Indo-Nepal border has hardly any motorable roads, intermittent electricity, persistent polio, unemployment, rice fields, nine months of floods and a community of the most wonderful low-case Nutt women who have boldly moved forward to chang etheir own lives and the lives of their community.

The change Ruchira passionately wants to happen:
I want sex-trafficking to end. I want a world where sex is about cooperation and not domination. I want a world where men and women do not sell or buy each other. I want women to have options.