Dance Bar - Aftermath

Aftermath

Starting August 15, 2005, the ban was implemented across Maharashtra. In Mumbai alone 150,000 people, including 75,000 bar girls went out-of-work. However due a lack of a rehabilitation program, within a few short months hundreds of bar girls (bar-balas) mostly illiterate young women sending income back to their families, were out of work, and were forced to turn to Gulf countries like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Muscat, frequented by top executives, and expatriate Indians, and which were experiencing a rise in demand for Bollywood dance numbers (item numbers); other overseas destination were the South-East Asian countries,, Malaysia and Singapore. Some moved into other Indian states like Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, where in cities like Chandigarh, Shimla, Ambala, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Patiala, Hoshiarpur, Gurdaspur and Bathinda, they even started making a living by dancing in marriages and private functions..

"The girls are very vulnerable now, pimps are selling the bar girls to other countries, because they don't have any work."

“ ” - Varsha Kale, Womanist Party of India, 2006.

Many started waiting tables as some of the former dance bar opened as regular bars, and employed them as waitresses although with sharp drop in income, some started dancing at mujras For example, by November 2005, some 5,000 former bar girls from across Mumbai leased out rooms with the help of brothel madams and brokers in and around Foras Road, near Kamathipura, and started performing improvised versions of the mujra every night. Another hub that crept up during this period was Congress House near Kennedy Bridge, on Grant Road, which has been city's oldest address of mujra performers, which embraced the bar girls' into their folds.

In many cases though, girls who could find other modes of income, moved to outright prostitution in order to survive, in Mumbai's red-light districts, like Kamathipura Some have even committed suicide in despair, as rehabilitation by the state has not been forthcoming . The dance bars themselves had to attempt to make ends meet by hosting live singing troupes or live bands.

However, on April 12, 2006, a Maharashtra state high court ruled the ban unconstitutional and gave the state eight weeks to file its case with the Supreme Court.

In the coming years, most known dance bar were either demolished or shut down by municipal corporation, but they moved into the outskirts of the main Mumbai city, into areas like Kashimira on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad National Highway 8, Vasai and Mira Road in Mira-Bhayandar suburb, where numerous illegal dance bars mostly in residential areas also serve as pick-up joints, were demolished in an extensive drive in late 2010, and numerous arrests were made including bar girls, customers and employees of bars. Many bar owner experiencing a drop in revenue started sending former bar girls on ‘assignments’ overseas. Agents continued to solicit out-of-work bar dancers from hubs like Congress House (Banarasi slum) Congress House near Kennedy Bridge on Grant Road, Mira Road, Banaras ki Chawl, Thane and Oshiwara. As a result, by 2011, bars in the Middle East, which were once dominated by girls from Russia and East European countries now replaced by bar girls from India, and mostly Mumbai.

Gradually immigration officials in Mumbai stepped up their vigilance against allowing single, unaccompanied girls with passports now had Emigration Check Required (ECR) stamped, this made travelling out of Mumbai increasingly difficult, thus the transit point for trafficking bar girls, shifted from Mumbai to New Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad.