Efforts by Nepali and Indian activists from the Nepal Child Welfare Foundation and the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude led to the April 2004 rescue of twenty-nine children, mostly girls, from the Great Indian Circus at Palakkad in Kerala, southern India.

* Efforts by Nepali and Indian activists from the Nepal Child Welfare Foundation and the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude led to the April 2004 rescue of twenty-nine children, mostly girls, from the Great Indian Circus at Palakkad in Kerala, southern India. Seventeen more Nepali children were rescued earlier from another Indian circus. A 2003 report on circus children compiled by the NCWF, the Esther Benjamin Trust, and the South Asian Coalition revealed that over 230 children between the ages of five and fourteen are working at twenty-nine circuses, and circus owners have admitted there are up to 500 children in the industry, about half of them Nepali.