Ruchira Gupta

Ruchira Gupta is an Indian journalist turned campaigner against sex trafficking and the founder of Apne Aap Women Worldwide. She reported for The Telegraph, The Sunday Observer, Business India and the BBC in South Asia, covering women's rights, insurgency in the north-east, caste and minority questions.

Her shift into organising came out of a film. While making The Selling of Innocents, a documentary on trafficking from Nepal into Indian brothels, she worked closely with the women whose lives it recorded. Apne Aap was founded in 2002 by Gupta together with 22 women in prostitution who had been part of that work, and she has served as its president since.

The method is to organise women and girls into small self-empowerment groups through which they collectively claim what the organisation calls four essential rights: education, livelihood, legal protection and safe housing. Much of the work has been with communities from denotified tribes, classified as criminal tribes under British rule, in which prostitution passes down the generations. In two red-light areas at Forbesganj in Bihar the number of brothels fell from 72 to 15 and from 17 to one. Gupta and her colleagues have also litigated, petitioning the Patna High Court on behalf of trafficking survivors, which in March 2013 produced a notice to the Bihar government on action against traffickers, and campaigning on police reform after a staff member from a denotified tribe was wrongfully arrested for exposing a trafficking ring. The organisation publishes Redlight Dispatch, a newspaper written by and for women in prostitution, and holds survivor conferences.

Its position, which Gupta argues publicly, is that women in prostitution should be decriminalised while buyers and profiteers are prosecuted; the organisation calls this the third way, and runs a Cool Men Don't Buy Sex campaign on the demand side. Before founding Apne Aap she had worked at the United Nations with the governments of a dozen Asian and European countries on national action plans and anti-trafficking law, and wrote training manuals for police and prosecutors supported by UNODC and UNIFEM. She testified to the United States Senate in support of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 and lobbied for the UN Protocol on trafficking; her campaigning in India contributed to trafficking being made a penal offence through the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act.

Her documentary The Selling of Innocents won a News and Documentary Emmy in 1996. She received the Abolitionist Award from the House of Lords in 2007, the Clinton Global Citizen Award in 2009 and the New York NGO Committee on the Status of Women's Woman of Distinction award in 2015, and served on Planning Commission steering committees for the eleventh and twelfth five-year plans.[2][3]