brothel owner for food, clothes, make-up and living expenses. In India, the Government's "central sponsored scheme" provides financial or in-kind grants to released bonded labourers and their family members, the report noted, adding over 2,850,000 people have benefited to date. Almost 5,000 prosecutions have been recorded so far under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976. Some women and girls are by tradition born into prostitution to support the family. The Bachara Tribe, for example, follow this tradition with eldest daughters often expected to be prostitutes. Over 40% of 484 prostituted girls rescued during major raids of brothels in Mumbai in 1996 were from Nepal. In India one estimate calculated that as many as 200,000 Nepalese girls, many under the age of 14, were sold into sexual slavery during the 1990s. Sex worker health Sex workers in India find it difficult to access health care and face discrimination, especially in government hospitals, based on their profession, such as being forced to take tests for sexually transmitted infection when they are ill, being refused to be admitted to hospitals without HIV tests, being refused to conduct physical examination before prescribing medication. Surveys have found that sex workers prefer private health care providers over the government ones where they have some kind of sensitisation training. Difficulty in accessing health care is due to factors such as hospitals sending women to their husband for approval to get abortion, financial hurdles such as high fees for abortion and difficulty procuring identification documents as many sex workers like unstable lives, having trouble providing a proof of address. A Supreme Court verdict in 2021 directed that sex workers be provided Aadhar and ration without asking for proof of address, which made the situation better for sex workers. In government hospitals, sometimes it is not even doctors who do abortions for sex workers, but ward boys will do. Sex workers also lack privacy in hospitals because people think they are okay with anybody looking at their private parts. Transgender sex workers face even more discrimination than women sex workers due to doctors' lack of knowledge of transperson bodies, hospitals not having separate queues for transpeople and hospitals not assigning them doctors but rather rush them to testing centres. Mumbai and Kolkata (Calcutta) have the country's largest brothel based sex industry, with over 100,000 sex workers in Mumbai. It is estimated that HIV among prostitutes have largely