Woman from West Bengal is fighting human trafficking by training women to become beauticians

Amidst the lush green tea leaves blanketing the landscape, 35-year-old Sukla Debnath sets up a makeshift salon in the open as dozens of young women swarm around her with excitement. She teaches these girls a diverse range of beauty techniques such as waxing, threading, haircut, and more.

Every Sunday, Debnath, a resident of Hasimara, West Bengal, leaves her house early morning and visits around six to seven nearby tea gardens to provide free beautician training to young girls and women.

A graduate and a trained beautician, Debnath is empowering young girls and women with her comprehensive beautician training sessions by equipping them with the necessary skills to pursue a career in the beauty industry. She is enabling them to envision a brighter future filled with independence and self-sufficiency. So far, she has trained more than 5,000 women in her town.

“I want to train as many girls as possible to save them from the perils of human trafficking and make them financially independent,” Debnath tells HerStory.

Saving women from human trafficking

Since childhood, Debnath saw agents coming to her village and luring young women with enticing job offers in the cities.

“Most of them would agree and go, but none of them came back. Many of these women end up in wrong hands and that is a really horrifying thing. Not just this, I have heard cases where people's organs were also traded for money under the garb of work,” she adds.

Making it her purpose to save women from human trafficking, she decided to devise a plan. At the age of 15, she sold her cycle and received Rs 1,200, which she used to take up a beautician course from a local beauty parlour in 2003. After receiving the training, she took up some wedding makeup projects and used Rs 3,000 she received to buy her own equipments.

To ensure women from her town don’t fall into wrong hands, she started going door to door to convince parents to not fall prey to these luring offers.

She also began working as a beautician and visited nearby tea gardens to convince women to get trained as a beautician to make them financially independent.

So far, she has trained women in 20 tea gardens. Since many of these women work in tea gardens during the week, she visits them every Sunday and covers six to seven tea gardens in a day. These women earn around Rs 7,000 a month, which sometimes goes up to Rs 9,000 or more during the wedding season.

Debnath also learnt karate to teach self-defence to young women. During COVID, she also helped in providing free food to the needy. She says that she has dedicated her life to serving people, and hence she never charges any fee from her trainees and has never raised any funds for the same.

Since childhood, Debnath has always been a responsible child. The youngest among four daughters, she was aware of the financial challenges faced by her family. “Since a young age, I wanted to be independent and not be a burden on my family,” she says.

Having lost her father, Debnath now lives with her mother alone. Her sisters are all married, and she believes that there are no more responsibilities left. “Whatever I earn from my work, I spend all of it on serving these women,” she says.

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Roadblocks and the way ahead

Debnath’s journey so far has been anything but easy. When she started on the endeavour to stop human trafficking and empower women in her village, she faced a lot of resistance.

“I was young and not many people used to take me seriously, but I never stopped,” she says.

Even her mother was not very happy with the choice of her career. However, her father was her cheerleader and supported her throughout the process. “My father used to always tell me that no job is big or small and therefore it does not matter even if I become a cobbler, but he always told me to ensure that I am serving people,” she says.

Debnath, lovingly known as Didi, embodies the role of an elder sister, extending her warmth and care to the women of her village.

Sushma, one of her trainees, now earns around Rs 8,000 a month. She remembers that after her father lost his job at one of the tea gardens, there was a financial crunch in the family. When she got an offer to earn Rs 40,000 by taking up a job in the city, she decided to agree to the proposal. However, she attended one of the training sessions of Debnath and realised the potential risks in going out to a new city alone. Therefore, she decided to take training from Debnath and work as a beautician.

“It was because of didi that I stayed back and it was all for good. I earn money on my own and this work gives me a sense of purpose and a feeling of fulfillment,” she says.

Debnath has been a beacon of hope for many young women in Hasimara and she wishes to be so in the future as well.

“I will keep empowering as many women as possible and for that, I will give away everything I have, if needed,” she says.