A new government report showed that more than 800 North Korean defectors have entered South Korea between January and June this year. The figure is up 15-point-six percent on-year.

Seoul’s Ministry of Unification on Tuesday released the preliminary estimates, highlighting the reversal of a downward trend in the number of North Korean defectors to the South.

In 2009, the number of defectors had grown to two-thousand-914, but it started to dwindle, reaching two-thousand-706 as Kim Jong-un took power at the end of 2011. The figure then slid to one-thousand-502 in 2012 and one-thousand-276 last year.

But, if the trend seen in the first half of this year holds up, the number of North Koreans defecting to the South will surpass one-thousand-500 this year. Some experts are predicting that the number of North Korean defectors living in the South is expected to surpass 30-thousand by October or November.

In the past, only one or two North Koreans defected from the North each year while staying overseas, but this year, scores of such cases were reported.

For example, 13 North Korean restaurant employees in Ningbo, China escaped in April and arrived in South Korea. Two months later, three more North Koreans working at another North Korean restaurant in China followed suit.

Experts say it indicates that the North is increasingly feeling the pinch of the toughened international sanction on the North, following its nuclear and missile launch earlier this year.

And according to North Korea experts, a growing number of defectors are from upper middle class households.

Recently, a North Korean teenage math prodigy participating in a math Olympiad in Hong Kong and a North Korean general were reported to have defected from the North.

Another Seoul official said that although half of the defectors still list poverty as the reason for their defection, almost 20 percent say that they came to the South in search of better opportunities.