Operation Red Alert

I am the founder and director of My Choices Foundation (MCF) and hold a CFA and received my MBA at the Australian Graduate School of Management. An expert in finance and banking, I decided to leave my career in Australia in 2012 to serve women and girls in India, by working for their empowerment. Under my leadership, MCF started its work through the Operation PeaceMaker initiative to stop domestic violence, having now impacted 88,800+ families through counselling.  

As work expanded, more cases of sex trafficking came to notice. In 2016 the Operation Red Alert initiative was formed to work on the prevention of trafficking of young girls. In collaboration with my team we conducted an 18-month research and developed a prevention-focused strategy. The research paper, which I co-authored, won the  2016 ESOMAR award for excellence in market research and is a seminal document for anti-trafficking program development.

Millions of children are trafficked in India every year and are coerced into sexual exploitation and forced into prostitution. Of the estimated 3 - 20 million commercial sex workers in India,  40% are children. They are held captive in brothels against their will, beaten and raped, and suffer from communicable diseases and even death. Only 1% of these girls get rescued.

Operation Red Alert developed the Safe Village Program, aimed at sensitising at-risk community members about human trafficking risk factors, creating awareness about ways to prevent trafficking and sustaining the awareness and empowering the community through Rakshaks, Nodal Teachers and Gram Mitra concepts.

Focused on rural India, the Safe Village Program includes innovative tools such as comic books and a national helpline, and is tailor-made with special messaging for each of the stakeholders to speak to their particular psyche and provide powerfully relevant information and motivation to be safe.

There are 3 to 20 million commercial sex workers in India and a estimated 40% of these are child victims of trafficking (ages 10 to 14). Factors in India enable trafficking such as: lack of education, poverty, caste-discrimination and high levels of violence against women. 

Once trafficked, the rescue and rehabilitation of survivors becomes immensely challenging. In many cases, families of victims of trafficking refuse to accept them into the family due to stigma. According to a pan-India field study conducted from 2002-2004 by the National Human Rights Commission, more than 90% of police officials interviewed had not received any training in trafficking and more than 80% gave it low priority or did not consider it a priority at all. The lack of training and limited knowledge of the legal provisions lead to insensitivity and inaction towards the survivor, at times even compromising her safety. 

In order to break the cycle of rescue and rehabilitation, My Choices Foundation devised an innovative prevention-based program called the Safe Village Program. Safe Village Programs, through the prevention model, seeks to reduce the vulnerability of women and children who are at risk of being trafficked. The program mobilizes and empowers communities to prevent trafficking. 

The Safe Village Program is a prevention program designed to help parents, teachers, village leaders and children understand what trafficking is, how traffickers work, and how to prevent it from occurring in their villages. The objective of the Safe Village Program is to empower each man, woman and child with the knowledge, information and emergency tools to identify and prevent trafficking. 

The Safe Village Program has engaging content for each demographic that teaches people about traffickers, the process of trafficking and modern slavery. The information is given through in-person sessions, video clips, skits and comic books. The program is supported by an anti-trafficking helpline that helps in rescue and due diligence for safe migration. 

Leaving behind the Operation Red Alert national toll free helpline in the villages has resulted in 33,193 calls being made from people across 8 states in India. Through these calls, we have handled 233 trafficking cases through our network of grassroots NGOs. Through our network of more than 1,000 Rakshaks keeping watch on their respective villages, we are getting closer to increasing awareness on trafficking to ensure that all children are safe from trafficking. The program has reached over 4,269 villages in India. 

The primary beneficiaries of the Safe Village Program are families in rural India. Due to poverty, the and lack of education, and generations of societal discrimination, people in rural India are vulnerable targets for sex traffickers. 

The Safe Village Program empowers girls, boys, mothers and fathers by creating awareness on trafficking and empowering them to be safe. The program has custom messaging for mothers and fathers, informing them about the importance of education, gender equality, protecting their families from traffickers and the lure of child marriages. We reach children through an innovative and engaging comic book with four characters who are confronted by trafficking, skits, videos, and in-person interactions.

The program involves village leaders by empowering them to be responsible to keep the village safe. We appoint volunteers called Rakshaks and Nodal Teachers who watch over children in the village and the school respectively, reiterate the message of alertness and report urgent cases back to Operation Red Alert, ensuring the sustainability of the program. The program has an anti-trafficking helpline that helps in rescue and due diligence for safe migration. The program is conducted by local NGOs (trained by us) and helps in rescue/prevention cases coming through the helpline. 

Our entire program is designed to elevate and bring awareness to one of the most perverse and devastating occurrences in humanity - human trafficking. Operation Red Alert is aimed at sensitising at-risk community members about human trafficking risk factors, creating awareness about ways to prevent trafficking and sustaining the awareness and empowering the community. Thus, operation Red Alert is erectly aligned with the dimensions of the Elevate prize. 

When I moved from Australia to India, after having never lived in India before, I was determined to use my education in finance to equip and empower women to better understand their own finances so they would be empowered to make wise choices for them and for their families. 

However, during my multiple conversations with numerous community women, grassroots NGOs and women’s groups, I identified one singular problem: domestic violence. Women needed to be free from the shackles of domestic violence and abuse to be truly free and pursue their dreams, before we started speaking to them about being financially empowered. Financial empowerment or education cannot be effective if women are subject to violence at home.

It was out of this need that Operation PeaceMaker, the first initiative of My Choices Foundation, was born. Through the many counselling sessions and meetings with local women, many cases of trafficking came to the organization and the response was to create the initiative Operation Red Alert, to focus on the prevention of child trafficking. It is through our 18-month research paper, which I co-authored, and our travels across India speaking to multiple women, that the prevention strategy was formed in response to trafficking.

I have always been passionate about women's empowerment. It was a seed that was planted in my heart from a very tender age. Whilst completing my MBA, I realized that I needed to make this dream a reality and hence, I moved to India. There is a poignant saying that has guided me in my determination to serve women and girls in India: “a dream is something you want to do but a calling is something you have to do”. 

When I arrived in India in 2012, I was strongly convinced that I will work with women to enable them to become financially empowered and that I will assist them in understanding their own personal finances. Having met with so many women’s groups across India, the same message occurred over and over again, that the greatest challenge that they faced was violence and abuse. I have always had a deep sense of justice and equality for women’s and girls’ rights and that was one of the reasons for deciding to move to India and serve the women there. This passion and desire and the urgency to reach women and girls motivated me and my entire team to keep on going.

Being equipped with an academic and professional background in banking and finance, I was able to understand the local community women’s position in the family and in the society. It is upon this understanding that our conversations enabled us to get to the root of the problem, which was equipping the women with knowledge of their rights and ways to empower themselves within the home - first. 

Having co-authored an award winning research paper on trafficking trends in India enabled me to fully comprehend the anti-trafficking landscape and devise methods to eradicate trafficking through the prevention model. 

As the founder of Operation Red Alert I have guided and led the research to the prevention response of Operation Red Alert’s Safe Village Program. From the inception of the Safe Village Program in April 2016 till date, Operation Red Alert has conducted 4,269 Safe Village Programs through our work with 80+ grassroots NGOs across 8 states in India. 

Through the Safe Village Programs a total of 2,388,378 people have been reached through our workshops and activities, including distributing 1,169,652 comic books to children in the villages where the Safe Village Program was held. As the founder of the organization and as a person who believes strongly in the grassroots approach to understanding both the problem and the solution, I have, here, highlighted my abilities to build on an idea that was started as extremely small and has grown to reach over 2 million people.

One of the most difficult and heartbreaking situations that I, together with my team had to hear was that of a young girl: “Why didn’t you come sooner? If only you had come to my village before, I wouldn’t have been trafficked.” This statement, made by a repatriated sex-trafficking survivor who attended our Safe Village Program, is the why the Safe Village Program exists and what motivates us to reach more villages. This was a story of a girl that knows the traumatic experience of being trafficked and realised the importance of the prevention story that was shared in her village. 

Hearing the words of this young girl, this devastating story and her traumatic experiences, made me realize that we need to reach more villages. This devastating story turned into an opportunity by reaching more villages and hearing less of these devastating stories. 

Rather than allow this heartbreaking story to serve as a setback, we decided to take this as motivation to reach as many young people as we could to teach them what trafficking is, ways to identify  traffickers, and empower children, women and men to know their rights and equip them with emergency tools to keep themselves safe.

As a co-author of the research paper titled Trafficking Trends in India, it was our goal to not only understand the issue of trafficking in India but to seek ways to prevent it from happening through effective and innovative methods, specifically methods that reach children. When we developed the Safe Village Program based on this research, it was evident to us that in order to truly build a sustainable model to eradicate trafficking, we needed to empower members of the local community. We needed to make sure that after the programs were conducted and the teams left the villages, the people in the community would be empowered to keep themselves safe. 

It was important for me to develop, train and empower people in the community to take on the mantle of keeping the village safe after we finished the program, i.e. handing over the reins to the people in the village themselves. We thus created the roles of Rakshaks (protectors of the village who would report any suspicious activity back to Operation Red Alert), Nodal Teachers (who would keep an eye out for missing children, etc.) and Gram Mitras (volunteers from the village to look out for each other). 

Operation Red Alert is one of the two operations that forms part of My Choices Foundation( https://mychoicesfoundation.org/).

We cannot expect different outcomes by doing the same thing. The Safe Village Program is an innovative, flagship program that uses a variety of tools and elements to meet the needs of the cause. The safe village program has proven to be a game changer in the way that the prevention-focus awareness programs are done. The project aims to target the most vulnerable villages and population of the country and ensure that all the members in the villages are educated about safety and education of trafficking. 

The program uses innovative tools such as our partnership with big data analytics firm, Quantium, and created the Red Alert Village Mapping Tool. This data-based tool pinpoints which villages in the country are at highest risk of trafficking and unlike most NGOs, we have positioned our work to focus on rural areas that are difficult to reach. Because traffickers prey on the most vulnerable populations, our work takes us to some of the most remote places in India. Most NGOs do not have this kind of reach and capability.

We use Innovative and Creative Messaging to initiate the discussion with children on preventing trafficking in villages, ORA created a comic book titled Light of a Safe Village with four main characters (Good Father, Informed Mother, Guardian Girl, and the Cool Boy) who prevent traffickers from operating in their village. To ensure the children have understood the message about being alert, we scripted a play about a family affected by trafficking, which the children perform.

Theory of Change

Due to the nature of being a behavioural-change targeted program, which inherently measures success by long-term commitments to respect and protection of women and girls, our programs are designed to have a ripple effect benefit for women and girls that last generations. Specifically, we will ensure and measure the long-term benefit in the following ways: 

 Data capturing and Follow Up

We are rigorous in data collection, and long-term follow up. We have several years of tracking quantitative and qualitative measures of success through our domestic violence cases as well. Our system ensures that data relating to cases, partners, community outreach centres and SVP activities are captured in one secure place, from which data can be extracted for analytics and management. Villages are tracked before and after visits and are evaluated according to risk of sex trafficking to occur now or into the future. Based on our data we can either personally follow up the villages or individuals.

NGO Support

We train local NGOs not only to implement the training but to stay closely connected with the community in the event that an incident may arise or if they have general questions or queries. Our data management system allows us to track a request from the community to the NGO and ensure that it has been adequately followed up. 

Relationship with Local Police

We always ensure to develop strong relationships with police, and that our Implementing Partners are in regular contact with police and are there to assist them if and when they need guidance or help with trafficking cases. Police often rely on our support for the investigation, case guidance and victim counselling.

Helpline

Our National Anti Sex Trafficking Helpline (1800 419 8588) is the first of its kind in India and was created in consultation with international renowned US helpline organisation Polaris. Each beneficiary of the Safe Village Program is given the helpline number. All helpline queries and emergencies are responded to within 24 hours, backed by a national referral network of NGOs and official government bodies. The helpline is currently supported in 6 Indian languages.

Current Number: 4,269 Safe Village Programs ; 1,169,652 comic books distributed ; 2,388,378 direct participants

Number in one year: 6,069 Safe Village Programs ; 1,869,652 comic books distributed ; 3,388,378 direct participants

5 Years: 10,269 Safe Village Programs ; 3,569,652  comic books distributed ; 5,688,378 direct participants

Working with gender based violence, particularly combating the trafficking of young girls for sexual exploitation, is a hard and heart-breaking task. It is a topic that most people do not even want to think about. That makes it particularly hard for our team to remain energised and mentally healthy. Combined with this, it is a hard problem to raise money for. 

That means my primary goal is to keep our team motivated and to keep building out our partner network. To have our dragon slayers energised and focused on the problem at hand. This year, next year, and every year thereafter. It is not a problem that is going to go away any time soon. And every time a young girl is trafficked into a life of abuse, it is a tragedy. We aim, and my goal is to stop every single instance.

Safety & Security -  It is monsoon season in June to August that could cause flash flooding and therefore delays on travel to the villages. (Monsoons/ Hurricanes/ Earthquakes)

Safety & Security - Road traffic accidents.

Delivery  - Possibility of threats and retribution to project team from traffickers for disrupting their activities.

Delivery of Project - Possible triggers include increased project profile, disruption of supply due to project running.

Fiduciary - Lack of required financial documentation for compliance and reporting.

Operational - Risk of key people leaving the organisation, impacting the project deliverables.

Safeguarding - Survivor re-traumatisation or re-victimisation - Poor management of survivors of trafficking and CSEC.

Safeguarding - Displacement of abuse: Traffickers’ attention shifts from campaign target area to new areas - Effectiveness of campaign causes traffickers to move to other locations.

Political - Covid-19 Outbreak impacts delivery - Political unrest - clash between center and state governments - School closure extending into second half of next academic year

Safety & Security (Monsoons/ Hurricanes/ Earthquakes) - 

Download weather app and be vigilant to the local/ regional forecasts daily and request security brief (including actions on earthquakes/ floods) from security manager of each venue visited

Safety & Security -Field staff to travel with reputable bus services & avoid travelling at night, as well as only travel when the traffic is less congested. All teams to be briefed on best practice driving procedures.

Project Delivery: Ensure thorough planning for more potential partners and frequent communication with partners. Staff are briefed on building strong relationships with communities and hire staff who are from within the communities and who can more easily gain trust from communities and work with community based organisations who have existing relationships with the target communities

Fiduciary - Ensure all financial documentation for compliance and reporting are up to date.

Operational -Ensure other colleagues have capacity to carry forward tasks in case there is a staffing gap 

Staff are sensitised to survivor issues and learn how to gain their trust.

Where appropriate and available referrals to psychosocial counselling are made.The project team develops and maintains good relationships with appropriate government officials and agencies, anti-human trafficking unit, police and other key stakeholders.

Partnerships support information sharing on shifts in trafficking patterns and traffickers’ movements; establishment of Rakshaks.

Covid-19 Outbreak impacts delivery: Risk of trafficking is higher during disasters. All programs that are currently being rolled out, are adjusted to ensure the safety of the team. Programs are limited. 

We have current and standing partnerships with US Consulate, Global Fund for Children and Global Fund to end modern Slavery. In addition to the above partnerships we have partnerships with 100 implementing partners across  8 states.

 All our grassroots prevention education is executed through these Implementing Partner NGOs. These partners are pre-existing groups working in trafficking or similar development fields. These partners provide a geographic relevance to the program. Over the long term, these partners provide localized support through follow-ups and responding to cases that come to the Red Alert Helpline from their area. The local contextualization that these partners provide, is critical to the success and effectiveness of the Safe Village Program.  

Second, Operation Red Alert has built a network of Strategic Partners who are committed to contributing to training, to knowledge sharing, and in the most critical scenarios to responding to cases reported to the Red Alert helpline. The NGOs that are a part of this network are stalwarts in their field and add invaluable support to the prevention effort.  

We strongly believe in partnerships and achieving SDG goal 17 -Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.

Currently all our fundraising efforts are done through:

1. Fundraising through philanthropic organisations

2. Fundraising through crowdfunding

3. Applications for grants

We have a very active team applying and obtaining grants and multi-funding. Most of our funding that we have secured from foundations are 18months-3 year rolling funding that ensures financial sustainability in most cases, but does not include expansion of our programs and hence submitting grant applications on a regular basis. As an organisation we are signed up to different platforms that are especially focused on grant funding for gender based violence, trafficking, andchild sexual abuse and marriage. 

View all our partners & Funders here: Partners & Funders

GFEMS - Operation Red Alert has been awarded funding for our prevention program by GFEMS (Global Fund to End Modern Slavery) under their 3.2 program. Her Choices Trust is the only organization that has been awarded this from India. It is a true testament to recognizing Operation Red Alert’s role in prevention and coalition building.

Global Fund for Children (GFC) - Selected partner in India for the past 3 years in a row. 

US CONSULATE  - Recipient of the US console that has especially tight due diligence. 

Charities Aid Foundation India (CAF) - CAF India is a registered charitable trust that provides strategic and management support to corporates, individuals and NGOs with an aim to ensure greater impact of their philanthropic and CSR investments. CAF parents with NGOs that have a wide impact and credible transparency.

Operation Red alert is extremely transparent with each Safe Village Program that we conduct and the costs incurred for each. 

Here is the costing information:

Unit cost for conducting one Safe Village Program - USD160

Unit cost of project personnel per program - USD75

Number of implementing partners - 80

Number of villages covered in a year - 2,400

Cost of conducting the program - USD384,000

Cost of project personnel per year - USD216,000

Total cost = USD600,000

Expenses related to the travel for the fieldworkers, cost of the projectors from the implementing partners, as well as the comic books that are handed out to the village and the training of the Rakshaks are included in cost for conducting the program. The cost of salaries of the project personnel and travel costs to the program location for monitoring and evaluation.  We operate in 8 states with 80 implementing partners. Each partner conducts 3 Safe Village Programs per month.

Due to political unrest and weather related events such as Monsoons, we are restricted to the amount of programs that are conducted each month. The above mentioned amounts does not take into account any expansions that we would like to do, such as to spread our programs to Nepal and Bangladesh. The costs are only for conducting the Safe Village programs.

US $ 69 2000

I am applying for the Elevate Prize to enable us to reach and identify more villages that are at highest risk for trafficking through our tested and proven vulnerability mapping tool. There are an estimated 650,000 villages in India. To re-skill local NGO partners who will implement the Safe Village Program through this funding and conduct the Safe Village Programs.

Most organizations in the field of anti-trafficking focus on rescue and rehabilitation - a very important area. But when we hear from rescued girls, it is clear that their trauma is immense and in many cases, irreversible. This is the reason we focus on prevention - to avoid any girl or women facing this abuse. Oftentimes, children are not attuned to issues such as trafficking especially when it comes disguised as career opportunities, an increased following on social media or the promises of a new relationship. This is precisely the reason we use comic books to reach children and talk to them about the realities and probabilities of this crime. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has further intensified trafficking operations. Research indicates that traffickers exploit the vulnerabilities of people who lack basic needs such as food, water, and shelter. In India, this group of “vulnerable people” are in the millions and with the number of COVID-19 cases increasing nationwide, it is incumbent on us to spread awareness on the rise of trafficking and empower people with the knowledge and tools to keep themselves safe from this pandemic [trafficking] within the pandemic.

Although all our programs have been running for multiple years, any additional expertise and support on the  monitoring and evaluation of these programs will be valuable partnerships. 

From inception of our programs we have run multiple media campaigns, one of these is the Respect to Protect campaign that features famous Indian cricket MS Dhoni, these were spread via social media, as well as the use of YouTube. In addition Operation Red Alert has created a detailed proposal for a  Good Father Campaign, with research based content. Having this campaign broadcast and run on television is a very expensive endeavour. If we can partner with a media house on spreading this campaign nationally, it will be a very valuable partnerships. 

We have have conducted Radio jingles in 3 states and topics that are covered are child trafficking, sexual abuse & marriage in 7 different languages. These are much smaller campaigns.

We would be honoured to partner with the Children Investment Fund Foundation. CIFF work to strengthen law enforcement systems related to child labour, trafficking, bonded labour and child sexual exploitation and ensuring swift prosecutions through child-friendly policing and Children’s Courts

Choking the demand for the products of child labour. Partnering with CIFF will enable us to expand our reach and enable a strong partnership in elevating children from trafficking and child sexual exploitation.