The Surat police and the Crime Branch have unravelled the mystery surrounding the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl by arresting the prime accused from Rajasthan, but detailed investigations have revealed yet another sinister crime which goes on unchecked in the state’s industrial areas.

If the probe is true that the prime accused Harsh Sahai Gurjar, arrested from Sawai Madhopur district in Rajasthan, had “purchased” the girl and her mother for Rs 35,000 from her village, then it vindicates the rights activists’ oft-repeated charges about the existence of bonded labour in Gujarat’s small and unorganised sector.

Investigations till now revealed that the mother and daughter duo was “bought” by the Surat-based tile fitting contractor to work as “bonded” labourers, which often includes succumbing to sexual favours demanded by the employer.

The story so far, as per the Crime Branch probe and reported confession of the accused, is that first the woman was raped and murdered on 20 March with the minor as an eye-witness, thus being a liability for the future. So, the girl too was raped and disposed off on 5 April and thrown in the bushes.

The twin rape and murder led to a hue and cry, coming as it did within days of the equally heinous cases in Kathua and Unnao, but the fine print of the investigations and confessions point towards rampant human trafficking going on in this region for providing cheap, defenceless labour force to the small industrialists.

“Even if it is not bonded labour, human trafficking cannot be ruled out in the small industries in and around Surat where there are a lot of migrant workers coming from all over,” Prof Satyakan Joshi of Centre for Social Studies (CSS), South Gujarat University, told The Statesman on Monday.

The sugar mills in south Gujarat are notorious for employing labourers from tribal areas at ridiculously low wages and the humiliation of women folk having to satisfy the lust of the employers/contractors. Rights activists have routinely raised these issues but they have been silenced by the new dispensation with threats of probes into their funding sources.

In the cotton fields of north Gujarat too, teenaged children from Dungarpur, Banswara and Sirohi districts of Rajasthan are kept as ‘forced’ labour for a pittance, child rights activist Sukhdev Patel told The Statesman.

Patel also said that he is requesting the activists in Surat to urge the Police Commissioner to fully investigate the existence of ‘bonded’ labourers in the small units of the industrial hubs in the region.

Many migrant workers in the slums of Surat are also in a way ‘bonded’, he added, as they are totally at the mercy of the employers and their ‘inhuman’ terms and schedules of payments. A thorough investigation may bring out much more gory details, hoped Sukhdev Patel.