A joint team of the Nepali embassy and Crime Branch of Delhi Police rescued them from a house in Uttam Bihar in the Indian capital, said Om Joshi, a counsellor at embassy in New Delhi. 

 

According to Joshi, a broker had lured the girls into going to Delhi offering jobs in Middle Eastern countries including Kuwait. They were kept in a private house in Uttam Nagar Phase IV for about a month, he said, adding that they will be handed over to Maiti India, a branch of Maiti Nepal--an anti-trafficking charity. 

 

Despite several measures put in place, trafficking is still rife, with human traffickers using different tricks to lure unsuspecting victims with lucrative job promises. Majority of women and girls rescued in different parts of India have been found by law enforcement agencies to be on their way to third countries. 

 

The Nepali embassy in Delhi has also tightened visit visa to third countries as part of its bid to curb trafficking. According to a 2001 International Labour Organisation study, an estimated 12,000 Nepali children were trafficked to India every year. A National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) report last year said around 16,500 Nepalis, mostly unmarried women and children, were trafficked into different countries in 2014 and 2015. 

 

A surge in number of trafficking victims was seen after the April 25 earthquake in 2015, stoking serious concerns about the safety of women and children who were hit by the disaster. According to the NHRC, there was a 15 percent spike in trafficking after the earthquake.

 

Nepal Police had received 281 complaints of fraud from 1,266 Nepalis based in various countries, including India, between September 15, 2015 and October 4, 2016.

 

The frequency of foreign employment related complaints from India were particularly high as fraudulent foreign employment agents and human traffickers had been found using the country as a transit.

 

Trafficker and so-called foreign employment agents often use Delhi as the go-to-transit for sending migrants to Gulf states and the countries have been declared off-limits for Nepali migrant workers by the government.  

The embassy in Delhi has already stopped issuing No Objection Certificate (NOC) for gulf countries. Similarly, it has tightened issuance of NOC for tourist visas for Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and other South Asian countries, which were also found to have been used by traffickers to smuggle Nepalis into different countries.