India’s National Commission for Women (NCW) Chairperson Vijaya Rahatkar has delivered a heart-wrenching statistic that nearly 32,000 women have been reportedly abandoned by Non-Resident Indian (NRI) husbands in Punjab in the last many years. She said the state’s girls are facing this grave and growing challenge of NRI marriage fraud.

Rahatkar said the available data of abandoned women points to the need for faster investigations. She asked for administrative and police support and improved inter-agency coordination and timely legal intervention for these and other affected women.

She met Punjab Governor Gulab Chand Kataria at Chandigarh to also discuss the growing challenge of substance abuse among girls and women in Punjab and for focused interventions in the area.