Ruchira Gupta helps women escape sex work and has made significant strides in helping curb inter-generational prositution
Where are the girls?” asked Ruchira Gupta to the men sipping tea and playing cards by the roadside in a remote Himalayan hamlet called Sindhupalchowk in Nepal. This was in 1994, when, as a young journalist, Gupta was researching a story on how villages managed their natural resources. During this time, she had come across rows of villages with missing girls. She was told they were all in Mumbai. Something seemed amiss, as Mumbai was about 2,000 kilometres away.
(This story appears in the 22 March, 2024 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)