Dubai girl deal lands Indian in trouble

Kathmandu: An Indian owning an entertainment company landed in trouble here while trying to hire Nepali girls, apparently to work in hotels in Dubai.

Manish Kotharia, owner of Drishti Entertainment Private Ltd, began a recruitment drive from a hotel in Kathmandu with the help of a Nepali agent. He had apparently selected 15 girls and taken their passports when a group of four plainclothes policemen raided his room in Sundhara area's Hotel Emperor.

The men, including two police inspectors, demanded Nepali Rs 50,000 from Kotharia, threatening him with dire consequences if he did not pay up. They also seized the Nepali girls' passports and Kotharia's mobile phone.

Though the incident occurred Thursday, Kotharia did not lodge a complaint with the police. Instead, he left for India. However, the matter came to be known and the four policemen have been arrested, a media report said on Monday.

Police say their investigation has been thwarted by Kotharia's failing to lodge an official complaint.

The incident comes as Nepal's rights groups as well as Maoist guerrillas have been trying to close down the mushrooming dance bars in the capital and key towns, said to be a front for the flesh trade.

Frequent police raids find dancers in the nude or even in compromising positions with customers.

The girls, most of whom are barely literate, say this is the only means of livelihood left to them after they were forced to leave their home districts due to the 10-year communist war, poverty and lack of job opportunities.

Many of them are also abandoned wives or women whose husbands have gone abroad in search of jobs, leaving them to fend for themselves.

A well-organised network of traffickers extends from Nepal to India and the Middle East whose modus operandi is to lure Nepali women with lucrative job offers to the Gulf. Many of the girls end up as sex workers, abused and underpaid by their employers.

With the Indian state of Mumbai, where dance bars once flourished, ordering their closure, recruitment of Nepali girls has been on the rise.