AIDS has a new name in Nepal: Mumbaiya

KATHMANDU - When Equal Access, an NGO, started a radio programme for Nepalis and Nepali migrants working in India, it broadcast the heart-breaking story of a teen from eastern Nepal.

The 13-year-old’s father sold her to two men who in turn dumped her at a brothel in India’s film and finance capital Mumbai.

There she endured violence and bestiality for four years. It included a client smashing her cheekbone which never healed and then, eventually contracting AIDS.

When she was 17, she was dying and was allowed to return to Nepal.

Before she died in August 2005 at the age of just 19, the teen was told by her friends what was killing her.

“I cannot read or speak English, I am just a prostitute,” she said in an interview a year before her death. “Mumbaiya is common for us girls who have worked in India.”

While AIDS and HIV are unintelligible to thousands of Nepali girls and boys sold into prostitution in India, they are however still familiar with the disease: only, it is known to them as Mumbaiya since enforced prostitution in the Indian city and the infection contracted there by male Nepali migrant workers have contributed to the spread of the disease in Nepal.

While there are about 14,000 people in Nepal with confirmed cases of AIDS or HIV after blood tests, the National Centre for AIDS and STD control estimates the number of infected people would be over 70,000.

According to the UN, there are over 160,000 Nepali girls in Indian brothels and about half of those are allowed to return to Nepal when they become sick or old and are HIV positive.

Due to the open border between India and Nepal and a bilateral treaty that doesn’t require the citizen of either to hold a visa and employment permit to stay and work in each other’s territory, Nepal is the biggest source country for human traffickers in India.

A report released by the US State Department this year said India still remains Nepal’s biggest flesh market with about 10,000-15,000 Nepali women and girls being sold annually.

There are regular reports of parents or relatives selling their daughters and in some villages, the shanties of such families are easily identifiable from their tin roofs and air of affluence in comparison to the other mud huts.

Blessed with an existing labour force of nearly 10 million, Nepal is currently experiencing an annual increase of 350,000 workers, according to Yubaraj Khatiwada, vice-chairman of the National Planning Commission (NPC) of Nepal.

“However, while about 150,000 new workers can be absorbed by the country, the rest has to look for jobs abroad,” he says.

Each year, thousands of unskilled Nepali labourers go to India in search of livelihood. They are mostly employed in India’s booming construction industry, as domestic help and as security guards.

In India, they are forced to live in poor unhygienic environments, that makes them vulnerable to diseases.

Also, many of the men, who are without their families, frequent the brothels, where due to lack of awareness they end up being infected with sexually transmitted diseases or HIV/AIDS and then, carry the infection back home to Nepal

To break this “infection chain”, Equal Access is running a radio programme “Home and Abroad” that targets listeners on both sides of the border.

It brings separated husbands and wives closer with both able to send messages through the programme.

Sunkesha Wod sends a pragmatic message to her husband working in Mumbai.

“The children and the cattle are doing fine,” she says during a Home and Abroad broadcast. “The rice harvest was 150 kg. I have heard about HIV, be careful about it to save our lives.”

The programme also teaches a song that is sung by Nepali women working alone in their fields with their husbands away in India in search of a livelihood.

The song is sung by them long after the programme has ended.

“Brothers who are in India, come home with money,” the jingle says. “But not AIDS.”