FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM 89 It is estimated that every year an average of 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese women and girls are trafficked to India for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation and about 200,000 women and girls from Nepal are working under mostly oppressive conditions in the various red light areas of Indian cities233. The reasons for such large scale of trafficking in persons can be found in lack of development, capital, infrastructure and skilled human resources required to carve out an independent path of development. Nepal’s economy is agrarian in nature marked by subsistence agriculture, which forms the sustenance base for 90 per cent of its 21 million inhabitants. Adult literacy is as low as 21 per cent for females and 57 per cent for males; infant and maternal mortality rates are the highest in South Asia. Because of above factors, out migration for gainful employment has been high over the past few decades. Linked to the migration is the issue of trafficking for the trafficker’s fish in the flow of outmigration. Added to the above factors is the social custom that designates certain social castes / groups as sub-servant sex workers such as Badi. Similarly, the custom of the Devki system has become synonymous with prostitution. Devki is a medieval system whereby a very young girl child is offered to a deity as servant-keeper of the temple to appease the deity, usually to ask for boons for the parents of the child or for others who acquire the child from an economically unfortunate family for a price. The girl child is then isolated from others and is made to live a celibate life. There are numerous Devkis in the far west of Nepal and the majority of them have openly turned into active and open sex workers. These social castes become the primarily target group for the traffickers. An open border with neighbouring India and a lack of bilateral and multilateral cross-border coordination to deal with the problem at subregional / regional / international level and additional dimension of the problem of trafficking in women and children. Sri Lanka Due to the location of Sri Lanka as a island, the incidence of trafficking is less as compared with Nepal, India and Bangladesh. Large scale trafficking of women and children outside of Sri Lanka does not take place. However, within the country women and children are being trafficked by agents from rural areas to cities, especially to Colombo. Some 233 Ibid, p.9.