The shortage of brides in some states with skewed sex ratio has made human trafficking a lucrative trade The Indian predilection for aborting or killing the female child appears to have created a clear market for trafficked brides, a new report says. The market is divided into supply states and buyer states, said the report published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The eastern states of Assam, Odisha and West Bengal continue to be supply states, as they always were, while Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan form the group of buyer states. The key reason for bride trafficking, as economist Amartya Sen once put it, is “missing women”, the Indian phenomenon of preferring boys to girls. He estimated that over 100 million women were “missing” in the country. The skewed sex ratio in a few major Indian states has given rise to an intense demand for brides from organised trafficking agencies. People in these states buy brides from poorer states, saying there are not enough women in their caste/community.

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