by MARK MAGNIER
In Mumbai, India, the Sangini bank in the Kamathipura red-light district serves only sex workers, helping them build their worth.
Sima enters the small storefront in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district, and hands over some money she had hidden in her bra, then adjusts her fake Prada T-shirt. It was a national holiday the day before and business was good, so she’s deposited two days of earnings, about $66.
Along the wall, other women sit on cheap plastic chairs, chatting, in a bank with an unusual mandate: It serves only prostitutes.
“My dream is to save a lot, go back to my village, build a house,” says Sima, 25. “Well, maybe someday.”
A vast majority of the area’s 4,000 sex workers have accounts with as little as $1 at the 5-year-old financial institution, called Sangini, Hindi for “female friend.”
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Said to be Asia’s largest red-light district, Kamathipura was first settled in 1795 under the British, gaining a reputation among soldiers and Indian customers for women whom human traffickers imported from as far away as Japan and Europe. Today it’s a seedy, albeit well-organized, network of streets in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood where women in encompassing burkas pass flurries of streetwalkers.
In addition to serving the women who come to the bank, three collection officers in red vests crisscross Kamathipura’s lanes handling deposits, withdrawals and new accounts.
Some of the women in the 14 narrow lanes specialize in working early, catering to overnight truckers, while others prefer handling the evening crowds. Most of the lanes are packed with four- and five-story buildings filled with 10-by-10-foot rooms, each with up to four beds. Male sex workers in the lanes are interspersed among the female workers, and Lane 1 has a heavy concentration of transgender people. Although Sangini’s clients are all women, it is considering signing up the other sex workers.
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