With just Rs 5,000 in fund, Bengal struggles to pay trafficking survivors

There is a mismatch between allocation for compensation to the survivors and the amounts awarded by district legal services authorities

West Bengal's State Legal Services Authority (SLSA) is unable to compensate survivors of heinous crimes such as trafficking, rape and acid attack, as mandated, because it has only Rs 5,000 left in its account. This was revealed to the Calcutta High Court by an SLSA lawyer on July 30, 2021 while it was hearing a case related to the non-payment of a Rs 4-lakh compensation awarded to a trafficking survivor in 2019.

The petitioner's case is no exception. Consider the following instances:

In August 2021, 29 survivors of human trafficking wrote to chief minister Mamata Banerjee complaining about non-payment of