Around 16,500 Nepali citizens, mostly unmarried women and children, were trafficked in the past two years, according to a national report released by the National Human Rights Commission.

The report, release on Monday, has also claimed an increase in vulnerability of trafficking especially of women and children, at least by 20 percent after the April earthquake. The report, which is based on primary and secondary data, has incorporated the figures of only three months after the quake. Nepal Police has record of total 1,233 women and children missing in three months of the earthquake.

The report claimed that the numbers of attempted trafficking victims in each of past two fiscal years (2013-14 and 2014-15) lie between 9,000 and 9,500. The NHRC in its study has concluded that majority of victims are recruited by giving false promises. Of the survivors, a whopping 85 percent had never been to school, few of them literates.

“Police rescued 161 children from different border points between Nepal and India in the same period,” read the report.

Trafficking route is reported to be the main official border points between Nepal-India and Nepal-Tibet.

“Female workers in entertainment sectors are most vulnerable to sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking,” said Mohna Ansari, spokesperson for the NHRC. “What appalled me is the number of marriage bureaus operating in Nepal, matchmaking Nepali women with men in Korea and China.”

There are at least 83

marriage bureaus operating in Nepal.  

An estimated 1,000 female migrants went to South Korea through marriage between 2005 and 2013. Of them, about 300 are happily married while others are in slavery-like conditions. Besides, the commission study found that Nepali citizens are also trafficked for kidney.

Studies show that eight Village Development Committees of Kavre district are mainly affected.

A study conducted in 2014 had showed that 16 out of 36 kidney donors interviewed were Dalits.

There has been lower number of trafficking in persons cases registered in Nepal Police, which was 185 in 2013-14 and 181 in 2014-15. “The key reason is under-reporting and under-registration of human trafficking cases, including an overlap in measures of Foreign Employment Act and Human Trafficking and Transportation Control Act,” says the report.

Of 4 million Nepalis working abroad, around 75 percent are unskilled labourers and are mostly in the Gulf and Malaysia.

To make matters worse, a vast majority of Nepali migrant workers in Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Lebanon are excluded from protection under the labour laws as indicated by the higher values of the ITUC Global rating index.

According to the record of Counsellor of Service Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a total of 1,005 Nepali migrant workers were rescued from different destination countries in the past two years.