Where Human Trafficking and Nepal Meet
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‘’Over 5% of Nepal’s population is highly vulnerable to human trafficking’’, says Nepal’s National Rights body. The United Nations defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transfer or harboring of persons through force or deception for the purpose of exploitation.
The 1,750km open border between Nepal and India is a dream for traffickers. Every year around 35,000 Nepali women and children fall victim, and are trafficked into India to work in brothels, sweatshops, or sell their organs. After the 2015 earthquake that ravaged large parts of the country, trafficking increased with over 500%. According to various research vital push factors of human trafficking are poverty, lack of education, political instability, and civil conflict. Human trafficking is a thriving business that accounts for $150bn a year worldwide. Women and girls make up 71 percent of all modern slavery victims. Nepal is one of the most lucrative markets, and at least 54 girls and women are trafficked into India every day.
Trafficking of people is widely recognised as being a high-profit, low-risk crime. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that according to the Kathmandu Post Nepal’s unemployment rate has recently passed the 10 percent. To illustrate Nepal’s dire situation, let me quote the World Bank: ‘’At a higher line of $3.20 a day, 39 percent of the population in Nepal is estimated to be poor in 2019, a 15 percentage-point decrease from 2010. About 31.2 percent of the population that are estimated to live between $1.9 and $3.2 a day face significant risks of falling into extreme poverty, primarily because of reduced remittances, foregone earnings of potential migrants, job losses in the informal sector, and rising prices for essential commodities as a result of COVID-19’’.
This pitiful set of circumstances results in women and young girls being an easy prey for the traffickers. What might be even more disturbing is the fact that the traffickers are often familiar faces to the victims, sometimes even their own fathers. For the traffickers to be successful they have to win the victim’s trust. In order to pass the border the victims have to be manipulated enough to be willing to lie to the guards. In many cases this happens by pretending to be a boyfriend and buying the oblivious girls sparking new clothes, while promising a better life on the other side of the border. Potential victims are easily recruited in the poorer regions with high illiteracy rates. If a relative or friend turns up offering someone a job, it is often the girls’ parents themselves who encourage them to go, without realising what is really happening.
All too often trafficking is thought of as solely being a means for sexual exploitation. However that may be one of the primary destinations of the victims, trafficking is also used to supply the lucrative illegal organ market in India. Supposedly organ trafficking took really off after the 2015 earthquake, but unfortunately not much information about this predicament can be found online. To sketch you an image of the situation, I’ll use a Q&A with Rajendra Ghimire, a human rights lawyer and executive director of the Forum for Protection of People’s Rights in Kathmandu.
Interviewer: ‘’How big a problem is kidney trafficking in Nepal?’’
Rajendra Ghimire: ‘’There has not been any attempt to find out the magnitude of the problem across the country. A survey conducted in the villages of Nepal’s Kavre district sets the figure at around 150 sold a year. Due to the lack of detailed and comprehensive surveys nationwide, it is difficult to speculate the number of kidney trafficking cases in the country.’’
According to Ghimire, the trafficking between Nepal and India is relatively easy due to the open border between the two countries. ‘’Nepali people often travel to India for medical treatment and for employment, therefore it’s easy to bring a victim into India and remove his or her kidney.’’
In the Nepali village of Hokse, many residents have only one kidney. Tempted by the promise of money, they are victims of an illegal organ trade that preys on poor, illiterate villagers to meet an ever-growing demand for healthy kidneys.
In the 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report, the United States Department of State concluded that: ‘’The government of Nepal does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. The government demonstrated increasing efforts compared to the previous reporting period; therefore Nepal remained on Tier 2.’’
However, efforts are largely reliant on the many anti-trafficking NGOs. These organisations are often criticised for their impotency, and lack of transparency. Most of them are located in Kathmandu valley and have limited reach in the rural communities where many victims and the vulnerable reside. Disorder on the organisational level, lack of communication and coordination, duplication and competition amongst NGOs proves to be limiting for any anti-trafficking efforts. The problem of accountability and transparency might be the all-encompassing evil in this debacle: no reliable database of NGOs exists, and there is no way to track their activities, expenditures, and administrative costs.
This isn’t to say that all is bad. Various organisations, like, for example, Maiti Nepal, are preventing human trafficking and supporting victims everyday by spreading awareness, offering counselling and rehabilitation services, and even organising repatriation missions.
Ghimire, in her Q&A, emphasised the need for a holistic and integrated approach. ‘’I think that for Nepal’s government, education, awareness-raising activities on a community level and employment-generating activities are necessary.’’ Also, she added, that providing people with opportunities to improve their financial situation is another important aspect.
A desperate haul for money often originates at a place of no choice. .
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Sources:
https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b3e0ac1a.html
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/09/qa-organ-trafficking-nepal-160911111556734.html
https://kathmandupost.com/money/2019/04/27/nepals-unemployment-rate-estimated-at-114-percent
https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/nepal/overview
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-63058-8_68
https://maitinepal.org/about-us/introduction/
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