Kerala - Kochi   

Massage parlours under watch

Mushrooming of massage parlours in the city is posing a serious law and order problem, writes Anand Haridas.

The police are keeping a strict vigil on massage parlours mushrooming in the city, as many of them turn out to be illegal and abetting flesh trade.

Recently a police team led by the Assistant Commissioner (Thrikakkara), A. R. Santhosh Varma, conducted as many as 10 raids in parlours offering Ayurveda massage and four cases were booked under the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act. In some other parlours, though the police received solid information on illegal activities going on there, cases could not be charged as clients were absent during the raids.

This has prompted the Assistant Commissioner (City), Martin K. Mathew, to ask all massage parlours in the city to come up with details of the staff and nature of their operations.

"A list is being prepared and that should send the message that these parlours are being kept under our close watch, acting as deterrent for unlawful activities," Mr. Mathew said.

Police officers say the presence of a big floating population mainly consisting youngsters from the affluent class is the reason behind the sprouting up of such parlours in the city.

The marketing of Ayurveda in the tourism industry has acted as a catalyst for these parlours. "We have evolved a highly transparent system of classifying the massage parlours, based on the reports by the Department of Health. We opted for the system of classifying, as there are limitations in bringing in legislations to check bogus ones. What we did was to publish the list of approved centres in our Web site and literatures," says K. V. Thomas, former Minister for Tourism.

This hardly helped in containing the menace it had triggered off. In most cases, the police find it difficult to get a woman witness from the locality, as required by law, whenever a raid is conducted.

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