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

Shyam Kamble has spent 26 years fighting human trafficking in India — the last eleven with The Exodus Road, where he's helped bring justice and freedom to some 2,300 survivors. 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'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's High Commission and ended with her going home.And he makes an argument you don't often hear from someone who has spent a career kicking down doors: that the real victory isn't the rescue. It's the education, in remote communities, that keeps a family from selling a daughter in the first place.Content note: this episode contains frank discussion of the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.