Ramoji Excellence Award 2025: Why Pallabi Ghosh Chose To Become A Human Trafficking Activist

Hyderabad: At 12, a curious Pallabi Ghosh encountered a man, harrowingly looking for his missing daughter in a small village in the South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal. She and her uncle also joined the search, asking the passersby about the girl. Nobody knew anything. All the while, Pallabi kept wondering how a child could disappear in a village where everyone knew each other.

The child was not found. As she travelled back to her home in Assam, the incident remained etched on her mind. It was her first introduction to the term human trafficking, though at that time, Pallabi did not understand what it meant.

Over two decades later, she has rescued over 10,000 human trafficking survivors and impacted the lives of over 75,000 women. Despite facing threats from trafficking networks and systemic apathy, Pallabi has remained unwavering in her mission.

In 2020, she founded the Impact and Dialogue Foundation, aiming to prevent trafficking at its source and provide holistic support to survivors. Now 35, Pallabi was awarded the inaugural Ramoji Award of Excellence in the Women Achiever category on Sunday for her extraordinary contribution to human rights, women’s empowerment and social transformation.

In an exclusive conversation with ETV Bharat, Pallabi shares her journey so far, how fraught with danger a human trafficking activist’s life can be and what keeps her going. “After that (the Bengal episode) till the age of 19, multiple incidents happened. Finally, I got to know in my first year of graduation that one of the reasons for missing children is trafficking. And that's when I decided that I will work in the area,” she recalls.

Born in Assam, Pallabi completed her higher studies in Delhi. While her groundwork in tracking human trafficking cases and rescuing those entangled began from Delhi, Haryana and Rajasthan, Pallabi realised that activists in the field were not able to work from the source areas.

“In trafficking, there is source, transit and destination. As I started working in Delhi, Haryana, and Rajasthan, as a young activist, I figured out that every other activist in the field was working only in destinations. But, if you want to end the crime, then you have to go to the source from where it originates. That's when I decided I should go to the source,” she says.

Pallabi then started working in West Bengal, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, states that, according to her, were the sources of many human trafficking cases. Despite years of facing human pain and battling systems resistant to change, Pallabi says it is the “human connect” that has kept her going. She recalls her first rescue, a young girl whose mother travelled nearly ten hours carrying a watermelon, the only gift she could afford as a gesture of gratitude.

“After the court hearing, the girl said something I still remember. She told the magistrate, ‘My mother gave me birth, but she is the mother who saved me,’” Pallabi says. “Moments like this remind me why I started and why I cannot stop.”

For her, the work goes far beyond the number of rescues. It’s about the emotional anchor she finds in resilience and gratitude. “There are women who travel miles to bring me a piece of jaggery or send cards made with flowers from their garden. Money cannot buy that,” she reflects. It is these small, human exchanges that keep her emotionally afloat in an otherwise draining field.

Her mission rests on what she calls the “three Ps” – prevention, protection, and prosecution. Of these, she admits, prosecution is the hardest. “I’ve rescued thousands, but there have been only a handful of convictions,” she says. The struggle, she explains, begins not during rescue operations but after them. Victims are repeatedly called to testify, often for years, forced to relive trauma until many withdraw their cases in exhaustion.

Prevention, too, is complicated in regions where poverty leaves people vulnerable. Working across the Northeast, she has witnessed families boiling leaves to fill their stomachs. “When people don’t know where their next meal is coming from, it’s easy for traffickers to promise them a better life. Poverty drives them straight into traps,” she explains.

The stories Pallabi carries are often heavy. She recalls rescuing a four-month-old baby in 2013, a case that revealed how trafficking networks exploit both desperation and deception. The mother, accused of selling her child, was herself a victim of repeated abuse. “She said she did not want her child to face what she went through. That stayed with me,” Pallabi says.

For Pallabi, every rescue is a window into how exploitation continues under different guises like child marriage, bonded labour, domestic servitude, or organ trade.

Technology, she warns, has made tracking traffickers harder. Disposable SIM cards, fake Aadhaar identities, and encrypted platforms and dark web networks have pushed the crime further underground.

She narrates a chilling case from 2024, where a teenager from an elite family was lured online. “Her parents were civil servants, and she had every luxury except attention,” Pallabi says. "She told us, 'My parents gave me everything except time.'" That case, she explains, revealed a new dimension to trafficking and online grooming: the emotional neglect and digital vulnerability among affluent families.

Through her NGO, Impact and Dialogue Foundation, Pallabi now emphasises prevention through community empowerment. The organization runs “safe spaces” in Assam, Bengal, and Meghalaya where survivors and at-risk girls receive vocational, educational, and emotional training.

“The idea is not to make every girl an activist,” she explains. “Some want to study, some want to learn a trade. The point is to give them power over their own lives.”

Her model of training one “didi” to lead ten others has gradually built networks of awareness across villages. With village response committees and regular monitoring, the initiative ensures local accountability instead of outside dependence.

“The only way to end trafficking is to make the community responsible. An NGO can come and go but a community must protect its own children,” she insists.

After years of working on the ground, Pallabi has learned to guard her privacy. “There have been threats. After one viral podcast, I couldn’t walk freely for almost a year,” she says. Her appearance and distinct voice make anonymity harder, but she follows strict safety protocols. “I keep my life discreet now. That’s the only way.”

Receiving the Ramoji Award of Excellence, she says, matters not for fame but for visibility of the issue itself. “My field is something people don’t want to talk about. It makes them uncomfortable,” she notes. “But trafficking is not a faraway thing; it’s modern slavery. It’s happening in cities, in factories, in chilli fields. The least we can do is acknowledge it exists.”

For those who wish to follow her path, Pallabi’s advice is simple but firm: “Be sure you want to do this, because it’s not easy,” she says. Many volunteers start with passion but leave when the emotional toll hits. Her family too once questioned her choice. “They thought I was wasting my future. But ten years later, they say, ‘She is ours.’”

She believes change comes from persistence, not shortcuts. “If your intentions are right, the universe will conspire to help you,” she says.