Far from the Cities: Shyam Kamble on Trafficking in Rural India

<p>Shyam Kamble has spent 26 years fighting human trafficking in India — the last eleven with The Exodus Road, where he&#39;s helped bring justice and freedom to some 2,300 survivors. </p><p>In this conversation, recorded in Bangkok, Shyam walks Preston through how trafficking actually works in India: the recruitment routes running out of Bangladesh, Nepal, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan; the pull of a city like Mumbai for a girl who has been promised a job; the market forces inside a brothel that make a child more valuable than an adult. He explains why online recruitment hasn&#39;t taken hold there the way it has in the U.S. — and why that makes traffickers harder, not easier, to catch. He describes a 2025 case involving a fifteen-year-old Bangladeshi student that drew in her country&#39;s High Commission and ended with her going home.</p><p>And he makes an argument you don&#39;t often hear from someone who has spent a career kicking down doors: that the real victory isn&#39;t the rescue. It&#39;s the education, in remote communities, that keeps a family from selling a daughter in the first place.</p><p>Content note: this episode contains frank discussion of the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.</p><p><br></p>