New breed of elite prostitutes cater to India's rich

By Melanie Lee

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Zeba, a 23-year-old model and actress says she's found the perfect job. The money is great, she rubs shoulders with the super rich and her working hours are convenient.

Zeba is one of thousands of high-price call girls servicing India's nouveau riche and the throng of foreign businessmen drawn to a booming economy.

"If you have a modelling assignment, you have to work hard," Zeba, who declined to give her full name in order to protect her identity, said in American-accented English.

"But over here, it's just one hour. You talk to the person for half-an-hour and then the other half-an-hour in bed. You make a lot of money and it's easy," added Zeba, who charges 200,000 Indian rupees ($4,600) for an hour's encounter, of which the escort agency keeps half.

Prostitution is illegal in India. Yet voluntary groups estimate there to be two million sex workers, most of them forced into the trade by crushing poverty. Many suffer from HIV in a country with the world's third highest HIV caseload.

Call girls such as Zeba live in a world far removed from New Delhi's infamous G.B. Road, its main red-light district, and work as prostitutes as a matter of choice, plying their trade in five star hotels rather than on the streets or in brothels.

Many high-price escorts such as Zeba are educated women from middle-class families who see prostitution as a lucrative and even glamorous profession.

"Only two to three percent of India's prostitutes enter the profession willingly. These are the high-class girls, and it is them exercising their democratic rights," said Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research in New Delhi.