Police in India say they have uncovered a human trafficking network that has sent hundreds of young women from earthquake-hit areas of Nepal to the Gulf, where they were forced into manual labour and sex work.

In a series of arrests 10 days ago, police at Delhi’s main airport detained two airline staff and two suspected traffickers. They also took 21 young women into their care, seven from the airport itself – where they were being led onto a flight to Dubai – and the rest from a hotel nearby.

“They were from very poor classes and were promised jobs with handsome salaries in the Gulf. They came from districts hit hard by the earthquake in [April]. It is this disaster that is most responsible,” said Mohammed Ishfaq Haider, deputy police commissioner at the Indira Gandhi airport.

More than 8,800 people were killed in April’s earthquake, which measured eight on the Richter scale and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, leaving millions homeless.

Campaigners and United Nations officials raised concerns about human trafficking in the aftermath of the disaster. Some experts were disparaging, saying such fears were unfounded.



The UN and local NGOs estimate 10,000 to 15,000 women and children a year are trafficked from Nepal. The majority end up in Indian brothels but some are taken overseas, to South Korea and as far as South Africa. The Gulf has long been a destination for women trafficked from south Asia.

Haider, the policeman, said two of the men arrested last week had confessed to arranging for more than 250 women to travel from Nepal to Dubai and Saudi Arabia over the last three months. He said they had described how the women had been approached in villages in remote districts and offered lucrative jobs before being taken on buses to Delhi, flown to provincial Indian airports, from where they were booked onto international flights to the Gulf flying via the capital.

At Delhi airport, airline employees had been paid off to help the women through immigration as international travellers. The traffickers planned to confiscate the women’s passports on their arrival in Dubai, before handing them over to contacts in the United Arab Emirates.

“We are now working on the racket and to find out more about this dirty game. This is our first case of trafficking of this scale in this way,” Haider said.

Nepal, one of the poorest countries in Asia, is the focal point of well organised smuggling networks dealing in everything from tiger skins to precious woods and narcotics.

Campaigners in Kathmandu said most of these criminal networks were based in India, which made identification of traffickers difficult. The gangs have representatives and agents looking for suitable women across Nepal, but particularly in deprived rural areas such as Sindhupalchowk.

In May authorities in India rescued more than 20 children from a human trafficking network targeting families who lost their livelihoods in the earthquake.

In this most recent case, many of the women came from Sindhulpalchowk and the district of Ramechhap, which was also badly hit by the earthquake. Others had been recruited from Jhapa and Chitwan, which escaped unscathed in the tremor.

The gangs work in different ways. Often local agents do not know the eventual destination of the women they approach, with some genuinely believing they will find well-paid work in Kathmandu or India. Others, however, are well aware of the real nature of their “jobs”.

The US state department has said the Nepalese government does not comply “with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking” but “is making significant efforts to do so”.