In a night, the women can expect to make as much as 1,000 rupees ($14.60), or as little as nothing.ĭharampura locality in Najafgarh is home to Perna community ‘Born into poverty’ Each client pays between 200 rupees and 300 rupees ($3-$4.50). While one woman is with a client, a friend will make sure to stay within shouting distance. They conduct encounters in cars or hidden outdoor nooks.
“We try to get it done quickly,” Sita explains. They travel in a group, sharing the rickshaw fare and the risk of assault. Now in what she guesses to be her late 20s, Sita still leaves the Perna basti (settlement), each night with other women from the community to tout for customers in “random places”: bus stops, lay-bys and parks far from their own neighbourhood and out of view of the police. Married in her mid-teens to a Perna man she hadn’t met before, she estimates that she was 17 when she became the sole earner in her young family. When daughter was around one year, that’s when I started this work,” she says. “My first child died shortly after being born. Sita belongs to Perna caste, and among the women and girls of this acutely marginalised community, entering the sex trade is a usual next step after marriage and childbirth. Here, in a tumble-down corner of Najafgarh, a patch of urban villages stitched into the Indian capital’s fraying hem, what Sita does for a living is no secret. She has worked through the night, selling sex on the highways tracing Delhi’s periphery, but she will bathe, cook breakfast, and get the children ready for school before getting some rest herself. New Delhi, India – When Sita* comes home in the morning, her husband is usually still asleep.
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