In Gujarat’s Vadia village, families and social workers say child engagements have helped keep girls from being pushed into prostitution. Women are trying to break a generations-old cycle of sex work, while poverty, stigma and limited livelihoods remain major challenges
Updated On – 20 September 2026, 05:16 PM
Vadia (Gujarat); Child ‘engagement’ or prostitution. That is the stark choice facing girls in this ‘prostitute village’, a disparaging moniker that is not a throwback to a shackled past but a lived present, where their engagements are fixed when they are as young as seven to help them escape the fate their mothers and grandmothers could not.
Vadia village, 200 km from Gujarat’s Ahmedabad, is where women are struggling to break free from roles forced on them by history.
For generations, women in the traditionally nomadic tribal village have been forced into the sex trade, while the men acted as their agents.
It continues to this day.
In a discomfiting ritual, men from the village of 750 in Banaskantha district head to the Palanpur-Tharad highway each morning. They queue up on the highway, not in search of work but to solicit truck drivers, passers-by and men from neighbouring villages and cities as customers for women from their village.
And so, while child marriages are banned in India, Vadia is still in a time warp, with the past impinging on the present. Getting their girl children engaged is seen as a shield, a chance to marry them out of the village before they are forced into sex work.
The irony is clear: change is making its way through the back door, navigating patriarchal pathways by opting for child marriage, or rather engagement, as a way out.
For several families in Vadia, which has a population of about 750, it is the only way of keeping their daughters away from the sex trade that has long sustained the community.
A 19-year-old girl who grew up in the village is emblematic of this conflict. Her mother and grandmother are both sex workers. Studying to be a nurse at a college far away, a dream that once seemed impossible, she is already married, with her groom chosen when she was 11.
“I grew up seeing my father and uncle getting men for both my mother and grandmother until they became ‘unfit to serve the visitors’ desires’. My mother told me that it wasn’t that she was forced into it, but it just felt like the norm everyone followed due to poverty. My mother was not even sure if my father was my biological father because of this,” she told PTI on condition of anonymity.
“But my mother decided that she would not let me be pushed into this… I was engaged at 11 in a collective ceremony and married at 18,” she added.
She is one of many.
Led by social workers and a few families, formal engagements are arranged for girls as young as seven to 12 from nearby villages or among relatives. Villagers have agreed to an unwritten code of conduct — girls who are engaged or married are not pushed into prostitution.
Visitors are looked at carefully.
On a hot afternoon recently, a group of men sitting idly on a cot asked searching questions of every stranger entering the village about the reason for the visit. Some women, clad in colourful ghagra-cholis, are outside, all either engaged, married or older women who have left the trade.
The women involved in the sex trade are mostly indoors, while men of the family or pimps get clients for them, said a villager.
The 750 residents in the village include about 350 women.
Stalked by the stigma of indeterminable fatherhood, women in Vadia remained unmarried for generations.
“When I wanted to get my daughter married, I was told that I needed to accept it as the fate of girls here and not be rebellious. I got my daughter engaged at 12 and married at 18. The boy’s family gave us Rs 1 to confirm the engagement and some clothes to my daughter,” said Chandra Sarania, who was forced into prostitution when she was just 15 and now runs a small dairy.
Despite the government allotting her family agricultural land in 1963, the lack of irrigation facilities in the village forced her into sex work.
Chandra has brought up three children — two sons and a daughter — from the proceeds of sex work but was determined not to let the shadow of her past haunt the future of her children, especially her daughter.
A glimmer of change arrived in 2012, when the first mass marriage ceremony was held after NGOs managed to convince some families not to force their daughters into the sex trade. Since then, such marriages or engagements have been held in Vadia every year.
Mittal Patel, founder of the NGO Vicharta Samuday Samarthan Manch (VSSM), who first led the initiative to organise mass marriages, said the practice has stopped several girls from being forced into prostitution.
“Persuading the families to stop pushing their daughters into this trade, confronting pimps who move around disguised as money lenders, sensitising society about this heinous practice, compelling parents to educate their children, organising the first-ever mass marriage ceremony in the village, convincing 90 of 160 families to give up the trade… the change has been anything but easy,” Patel said.
“Once girls are engaged, even the boy’s family gets protective. Efforts like reviving borewells and lakes, rejuvenating farming land, providing interest-free loans to families to help them start their own businesses have helped generate alternative means of livelihood here. We see this as an approach to curb girls as young as 12-13 years from being pushed into prostitution,” she told PTI.
According to Patel, some activists have raised concerns about encouraging child marriage, but a child engagement is better than prostitution and ultimately no marriage or life of dignity.
For some parents, it is also a means to give their daughters a chance at education and a better life.
Like Rameshbhai Sarania, who has two daughters, one engaged at eight and the other at 11.
“Both are married now and have even completed their schooling. I fought with my brother too to not let his daughters get into the trade. Even now, we find it difficult to get grooms for our girls because of the stigma attached to the village’s name, but it is still better than them getting into the sex trade,” he said.
According to folklore, the Sarania community is a nomadic tribe that once travelled with the army of Maharana Pratap of Mewar. While the men sharpened arms such as shields and swords, women would entertain troops. It is said that when India achieved independence in 1947, the Saranias found themselves out of work and, for lack of options, returned to prostitution as a means to earn a livelihood.
As they fight the present and face the challenges of the future, the past is clearly still to be reckoned with for the villagers of Vadia, who are struggling to shake off the tag of ‘prostitute village’.
