Celebrated at birth, pushed into sex work

Unlike most communities in India, the Banchhadas in M.P. invest more in their daughters’ upbringing than in their sons’, by giving them better nutrition and clothes, only so that they can force them into sex work and live off their earnings. Branded a ‘criminal tribe’ by the British and now classified as a Scheduled Caste, the community remains on society’s margins as government and NGOs have struggled to break the cycle, reports Mehul Malpani