• When E Kathirvel and Nagarani, pavement- dwellers in Pulianthope, woke up on an October morning in 1999, they found their 18 month-old son Sateesh missing. On May 3, 2005, police located the boy. But he had been legally adopted by the Bisessars, a Dutch couple, who had named him Anbu Rohit Bisessar and lived in Almere in the Netherlands. Sateesh spoke only Dutch. The police showed Nagarani a picture of the boy, pinned to a register of a Chennai-based adoption agency, Malaysian Social Service, which was being investigated. “We want him back,” said Nagarani. The police have sought the Centre’s help to bring back Nagarani’s child, now 9.
• Lakshmi Parveen lost 18-month-old Fathima in December 1998. Fathima too was stolen while asleep on a pavement. Seven years later, Varadarajan, an alcoholic who knew Lakshmi’s father, told her it was he who had stolen and sold the child for Rs 2,000. She took him to the police station and his confession uncovered a major adoption racket. Fathima was traced to Neyveli where she lives with her adopted parents. It was during this investigation that Nagarani’s son was traced to the Dutch couple.
If Tamil Nadu police prove that the more than 350 adoptions that Malaysian Social Service processed during 2000 were of children kidnapped from the slums, this could be one of the biggest cases of child trafficking to reach the courts. Booked in the case are P V Ravindranath (who died last year), his wife Vatsala, and son Dinesh Kumar, besides some brokers.
The police record of tracing missing children is, however, good. From 2003 to 2006, of the 8,681 children who went missing, 8,014 were “traced” and 667 were recorded as “untraced”. But much of the credit for the work goes to NGOs who run child helplines in 24 of its 30 districts and work in perfect tandem with police stations and child welfare committees (CWCs), which have been set up in 18 districts. The helplines have proved a lifeline for runaways and children abused where they work.
