Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi is about to launch a new campaign against child abuse and trafficking.
It is a war on rapes, war on child sexual abuse and trafficking because these are not ordinary crimes and they cannot be solved through the business-as-usual approach– these were the Nobel winner's words on the campaign.
Two children are sexually abused every hour.
One child goes missing every eight minutes in India.
These children are trafficked– sold and bought with more than 9,000 children being trafficked in India in 2016, up nearly 25 percent from the previous year, according to the Ministry of Women and Child Development.
About 14,000 children were victims of rape and sexual harassment in 2015, data from the National Crime Records Bureau showed.
But those figures may only be the tip of the iceberg, with experts saying the government underestimates the numbers in a country where a shroud of silence surrounds such crimes.
Satyarthi hopes his "India March", which will kick off from the country's southernmost tip of Kanyakumari and finish in New Delhi on October 16 after travelling across all 29 states and seven union territories, will open people's eyes to the mounting epidemic.
Traffickers lure children, mostly from remote villages, with false promises of jobs before selling them off to brothels, factories or gangs which force them into begging.
The soft-spoken 63-year-old has been at the forefront of the drive against child labour in India, where over 10 million children are engaged in work, according to UNICEF.
He blames India's "failed" law enforcement, weak prosecution and low conviction rates for their plight.
Satyarthi founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Movement to Save Childhood) to rescue children working in horrifying conditions.
In 1980 he quit his job as an electrical engineer to take up the cudgels on behalf of India's most vulnerable citizens.
The married father of two recalled his first rescue operation in 1981—at a time when India had no law against child labour.
In 2014 Satyarthi jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize with Pakistani child activist Malala Yousafzai.
His movement has liberated 86,000 children from bonded labour across India and has activist networks in more than 140 countries.
In the 1990s he organised the Global March Against Child Labour, an international coalition of groups aiming to free millions of children from slavery worldwide.
