Labour panel wants IDs given to sex workers

NEW DELHI: No sex please, we’re Indian. Two decades or more after women’s groups here first attempted to kick off the covers and officially recognise those engaged in the sex industry as sex workers and the legislature finally defended the right of a sex worker’s child to be identified in all official records based solely on maternity, a central panel of note, the National Commission on Labour, has recommended that sex workers be registered through ID cards as self-employed workers with all attendant health and social security benefits.
Ironically, there are no reliable estimates of the number of those engaged in the industry who can be described as ‘sex workers’ (as opposed to those who work in brothels with their own special problems of unlawful confinement, exploitation, torture, even trafficking in women for the industry) and the Second National Labour Commission has hazarded sweepingly that the number of sex workers may “run into many lakhs or millions.�
As if that were not bad enough, the question of those now described as sex workers was raised only once in the many seminars that the Commission held on unorganised labour in varied sectors and that too, it says, “furtively.�
“There are no grounds today to believe the phenomenon, or if one wants to term it as such, the profession, will disappear merely through exhortation. And as long as it exists, we have to recognise that it is related to exploitation, inhuman conditions and poor public health,� the panel report contends.
Against this, it has recommended that the government, in expedient consultations with social scientists, NGOs in the field, trade unions, human rights organisations and vigilance authorities, formulate a policy that will “ensure protection, public health and public safety including the protection of public morality.�
The urgency on registering sex workers through ID cards is moored primarily in health concerns and the rapid spread and high incidence of AIDS in the country. The registration will play a key role to subjecting all sex workers to periodic and mandatory health check ups.
Given this, these workers should have the facility to be registered as self-employed workers and be entitled to the benefits of all the schemes that have been recommended to other sections of self employed workers in the unorganised sector of employment, including welfare and medical benefits.
Children of sex workers are also eligible for special attention. These children, the report holds, should not be denied opportunities for education and other benefits open to children in other sectors of the self employed.