The government in Nepal said yesterday it would investigate reports that children from earthquake-hit regions were being trafficked to Britain and sold as household slaves.
A report published by British tabloid The Sun said that Nepali children as young as 10 years old were being trafficked to northern India and sold to British households.
The government-affiliated Child Welfare Board said they would assist in the investigation.
Officials in quake-hit Dolakha district said that parents from the area often sent their children to India to study to become monks.
They had no registered cases of trafficking, the district office said, although they said they could not rule out the possibility that children were being trafficked from their temporary homes in India.
More than 39,300 children were affected in the 14 worst-hit districts due to the earthquake and aftershocks in April and May 2015, according to the government. More than 1,000 were orphaned.
The orphans were sent to children’s homes in different parts of the country, which will also be investigated as part of the official probe.
The Sun reported that children were being sold for £5,300 ($7,600) by trafficking gangs operating in India. The British government has urged the police to investigate the claims.
Nepal government banned both international and local child adoption in the aftermath of the earthquakes last year to prevent child trafficking.
An investigation by The Sun newspaper suggested that gangs operating in the north Indian state of Punjab are preying on destitute Indian children, as well as Nepali children who migrated to India after earthquakes hit their country last year.
The article published on Monday prompted British Home Secretary Theresa May to call for a police investigation into the allegations of child trafficking - “a truly abhorrent crime” - and
action against perpetrators.
The Sun’s investigation was carried out by an undercover reporter posing as a wealthy British-Indian visiting the city of Jalandhar, looking for a child worker to take back to the UK.
It quotes a trader, who had lined up three children for the reporter to choose from, claiming he had supplied mostly Nepali boys to rich families in England.
“Take a Nepalese to England. They are good people. They are good at doing all the housework and they’re very good cooks. No one is going to come after you,” he was quoted as saying.
“India is flooded with boys. Nepal has been destroyed and all the Nepalese are here. We go to the poor parents, we talk to them, we do a deal,” he added.
South Asia is the fastest-growing and second-largest region for human trafficking in the world, after East Asia, according to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC).