Most of the girls are too psychologically damaged to even think about escaping. "What could we do if we escape? The police won't help you. They're all corrupt", says one young girl, Kalpana. It all started on her way home from work at a carpet factory in Kathmandu, when a landslide caused the bus to stop. "I was really thirsty. Two men said, 'Drink from this bottle.' After drinking a few sips, I blacked out." When she woke up, she was in a brothel in Bombay. Kalpana is only one of over 100,000 prostitutes here, many of them child prostitutes. There are several aid organisations working to expose child prostitution; Rescue Foundation is one of these, and has a number of informers working undercover in Bombay. We see a raid on a brothel suspected of housing under-age girls. 14 young girls emerge from a room with a hidden ceiling - six or seven of them are Nepalese. The growing sex industry in India clearly provides the incentive for trafficking. But some think the problem stems from cultural traditions: "Women's personality is always defined in terms of sex and marital status", says lawyer Yubaraj Sangroula. And this is a much harder problem to tackle.

Produced by Dixit International