11 girls rescued from beauty parlour in Porvorim

PANAJI: The crime branch rescued 11 girls from North Eastern states who were trafficked to Goa to work in a beauty parlour in Porvorim.
Police raided Lotus Beauty Parlour on Saturday night and rescued eight girls. They also arrested Shanta alias Laxmi Mishra, the owner of the parlour, along with four men, on charges of trafficking.
Later, police rescued three more girls who had escaped from the parlour on October 4, and were hiding to escape being caught by Mishra and her men.
Incidentally, the whole racket of employing girls in the beauty parlour and then pushing them into the flesh trade was exposed when these three girls called their relatives in Mizoram and spilled the beans. A police complaint was lodged in Mizoram and the Mizoram police along with a local NGO contacted Goa-based NGO ARZ with detailed information and an FIR copy. ARZ on Saturday submitted the same to the police, who raided the beauty parlour premises.
Incidentally, after the girls were rescued, Mishra told the police that she had on Saturday evening at about 5.30pm given a complaint to the Porvorim police against the three girls as they were consuming beer and gutka in her parlour premises and she had removed them from the job. This raised suspicions amongst the raiding police team that information about the raid was probably leaked.
"Six of the girls are from Nagaland and five from Mizoram. One of the girls is a minor. The girls have been rescued and sent to a protective home. They have revealed that they were trafficked to Goa with the promise to work in a beauty parlour and then forced into the flesh trade. If they refused they were punished," said police sources.
"Mishra had agents who would hire girls from North Eastern states and then traffic them to Goa for the flesh trade. We also learned that recently she had gone to Nagaland to recruit," police added.