The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Bengali: দুর্বার মহিলা সমন্বয় সমিতি Durbar Mohila Shômonbôe Shomiti "Unstoppable Women's Synthesis Committee") or Durbar, is a collective of 65,000 sex workers in West Bengal. Established on February 15, 1992, in Sonagachi, the largest red-light area in Kolkata, West Bengal, India with estimated 11,000 sex workers, Durbar has been working on women's rights and sex workers' rights advocacy, anti-human trafficking and HIV/AIDS prevention. The Durbar states that its aims are the challenging and altering of the barriers that form the everyday reality of sex workers' lives as they relate to their poverty or their ostracism. Durbar runs 51 free clinics for sex workers across West Bengal, with support from organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), who also help Durbar in its initiatives like networking, rights protection and creating alternative livelihood for sex workers.
The group is overtly political in its aims of fighting for the recognition of prostitution as legal work and, of sex workers as workers and, for a secure social existence of sex workers and their children. They work for the legalization of prostitution and seek to reform laws that restrict human rights of sex workers.
Read more about Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee: History, HIV/AIDS Project
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