Raipur, Aug 4 - Too poor to cough up the bail amount, a former national level woman athlete was still lodged in a jail in the Chhattisgarh capital Tuesday, four days after being arrested for prostitution, police said.

A police officer who arrested Nisha Shetti, 26, last Friday from a posh locality of Raipur said she had revealed during interrogation that she was forced to become a call girl due to deprivation and had travelled to Raipur from Mumbai to earn Rs.50,000 from a few businessmen, who had booked her for 15 days.

'Nisha along with two other women, who were arrested July 31 from Devendra Nagar, informed police that she entered into prostitution recently to get over starvation,' Shashimohan Singh, additional superintendent of police, Raipur, and the officer who is investigating the case, told IANS.

Nisha, who originally belongs to Assam and had reportedly won a silver medal in athletics at the 1998 National Games, has told the investigating officer that she had been in debt since 2007 after her husband, Sunil Shetti, who was also a sportsperson, died due to kidney problems.