In Nepal's rural backstreets, India's dry border towns, and Bangladesh's low-lying areas, a hidden crisis unfolds—girls and women are trafficked under the false promise of marriage. These "marriages" usually begin with promises of protection and prosperity, only to end as labor exploitation, sexual slavery, or domestic servitude. This tradition, known as the bride trade, is the most prevalent and politically complex form of human trafficking in South Asia.
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Marriage as an institution has always been influenced by transactional forces–arranged marriages, socio-economic stratification, and dowries. However, in the last several decades, another side to it: traffickers who exploit societal mores, gender imbalance, and open borders to extort women into sham marriages that are used as weapons of exploitation.
This is not a new issue. Historically, women from poorer regions–such as northern Bangladesh or western Nepal–have been trafficked into wealthier regions of India under the guise of marriage to address bride deficits caused by [censored] ratios favoring men. However, the sophistication, the cross-border nature, and scale of these operations have increased, yet policy reactions remain frighteningly feeble.

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The Cross-Boarder Lybrinth
The South Asian region contains some of the most active and busiest routes in the world, such as Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Victims of trafficking are easily transported across countries with little resistance due to the lax immigration control. Institutional apathy dominates, as intelligence sharing between countries is poor.
Allowing borders to stay open, there are bilateral agreements, such as the India-Nepal Treaty of Peace and Friendship. However, they typically lack the enforcement provisions in place that would counter trafficking.
The spaces that traffickers use have been provided by nationalist competitions, weak regional cooperation, and bureaucratic inertia. Politicized competition often gets in the way of cooperative action. For instance, the India-Bangladesh border has been a notorious transit point for irregular trafficking and migration, and the border officials are often under-motivated and under-trained to deter and detect forced women’s movement. Similarly, Nepal and India have had strained relations due to nationalism and border disputes, making cooperative action against trafficking difficult.

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The Law on Paper, Not in Practice
South Asian nations have passed forced marriage and anti-trafficking laws. Nepal’s Human Trafficking and Transportation Control Act, Bangladesh’s Prevention and Suppression of Human Trafficking Act, and India’s Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act have all been passed. While on paper, these lawmaking processes look attractive, enforcement is woeful.
Law enforcement officers tend to be undertrained and insensitive. Police stations are where legal procedures are mired due to procedural delays and tainted systems, as well as secondary victimization of the survivors. Moreover, patriarchal sentiments strongly entrenched in officials often result in trafficking being watered down as voluntary migration or "family matters," especially when framed in the culturally sacrosanct backdrop of marriage.
Gender, Migration, and The Political Terrain
The marriage-trafficking connections cannot be disentangled from broader concerns of immigrant politics and gender inequalities. Systematized gendered prejudice—deposited in the form of restrictive access to schooling, labor, and inheritance rights—puts women disproportionately at risk of being trafficked. Families residing in economic misery and desperation may receive dowry demands from middlemen or stranger grooms without realizing that these demands are nothing but fronts for exploitation.
Migration policy also often guided by political rhetoric that speaks in terms of human security instead of national security. Anti trafficking practices can be co-opted into securitized rhetoric that criminalises, rather than frees victims. Legitimate union or Cross-border union may be even more tested, propelling discouraging detection and underground clandestine networks.

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The Path Forward: Regional Reform and Will
Intervening against bride trade requires more than isolated legal reform or reactive policing–it must be a comprehensive regional initiative based on political will. Responsible for intelligence-sharing, cross-agency operations, and victim repatriation, the South Asian Anti-Trafficking Task Force could be an important beginning. Along with this, local empowerment can generate social resistance against marriage trafficking. For instance, community vigilance, education campaigns, and survivor support networks are all efforts made by locals.
However, the region needs to reframe the disclosure: trafficking is not just a crime, but also a symptom of deeper gender justice, political cooperation failure, and governance. If marriage continues to afford the convenient cover for selling and purchasing women, then the bride trade will remain a flourishing underground phenomenon.