Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee

Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee

Peer educators of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in the streets of Kolkata
Abbreviation	DMSC
Formation	1995; 29 years ago (1995)[1]
Type	CBO
Location	Sonagachi, Kolkata
Region served	West Bengal
Membership	sex workers
President	Putul Halder
Secretary	Kajol Bose
Mentor	Bharati Dey
Chief Advisor	Dr. Smarajit Jana
Website	www.durbar.org

The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Bengali: দুর্বার মহিলা সমন্বয় সমিতি Durbar Mohila Shômonbôe Shomiti "Unstoppable Women's Synthesis Committee"), or simply Durbar, is a collective of 60,000 sex workers in West Bengal. Established on 15 February 1992, in Sonagachi, the largest red-light district 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.^[1][2] 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 organisations 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.^[3]

The group is overtly political in its aims of fighting for the recognition of prostitution as legal work and, of sex workers as workers^[4] and, for a secure social existence of sex workers and their children. They work for the legalisation of prostitution and seek to reform laws that restrict human rights of sex.^{[citation needed]}