Many more Falaks crying for help

Sopan Correspondent/New Delhi

Falak case has brought to the fore the situation of child trafficking in the country. Administration’s lackadaisical attitude has emboldened traffickers.

The Falak case has brought to the fore the situation of child trafficking in the country. In Delhi’s Kashmere Gate in old Delhi, there is a home for girl children. The condition of the home itself speaks volumes of the plight of its inmates. Like the Kilkari Rainbow Home for Girls, the national capital is home to 100 such child shelters with thousands of children. A closer look revealed that their stories are almost never heard, and two-year-old Falak who was separated from her mother, battered and is still battling for life at AIIMS was only one such abandoned child.

In the muddy courtyard of the Kilkari home, six-year-old Anisha is the youngest resident. She rubs the slate board clean every time she draws something on it. She is trying to recollect faint memories of the day when she was found by police at the crowded Nizamuddin Railway Station here a few months ago.

"Mummy ne mausi ke ghar bheja tha...Yaad nahi uske baad kahan gayi...My mother had left me at aunt's home...don't remember what happened after that)," Anisha said.

The zonal integrated police network of Delhi Police lists over 4,000 children missing in the capital.

"It is a vicious circle as metropolitans pull families from smaller towns in search of employment and work. Rights are violated when children from such families are lured for work," said Shanta Sinha, chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), headquartered in Delhi.

"The implementation of child protection laws is not happening the way it should. Other than stronger implementation, we need regulation and monitoring," said Sinha, adding that there were over 50,000 children in need of a shelter home in the capital alone.

Battered baby Falak has been reunited with her mother along with two siblings, but doctors fear it may be too late for the child.

She was earlier abandoned at AIIMS by a 14-year-old girl, who had allegedly been pushed into prostitution by a man. She is at the centre of a case that blew the lid off trafficking and exploitation rackets in a country where 11 children go missing every hour.

According to Childline India Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs a 24-hour helpline (1098) to assist children in need of care and protection, nearly 500 cases that require intervention are received by it every month in the capital.

"We have nearly 500 intervention cases coming to us on a monthly basis. This means dealing with missing children, victims of child labour, children who have been maimed and pushed into beggary," said Komal Ganotra, specialist of training and advocacy at the Childline India foundation.

If an abandoned child is found by police, he or she is handed over to the child welfare committee (CWC) to inquire about his or her whereabouts. If it is not possible to relocate a child, he or she is shifted to a shelter home.

What goes unnoticed, other than cases of abandonment and abuse, is the alleged mafia involvement in organised crime against children.

"It is different to have an agency for a certain task. But the pattern on crime against women and children needs to be tracked as there is an organised mafia that pulls them from states like Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh for exploitation," said Ganotra.

A study by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) - 'Action Research on Trafficking in Women and Children' in 2003 - found a grave link between trafficking and missing children. On an average, of the 22,480 women and 44,476 children reported missing in the country every year, over 5,000 women and nearly 11,000 children remain untraced.

Even if a child gets traced, there was a huge gap between institutional care and alternative family support that was to be given, said Bharati Sharma, former chief of the CWC.

"The child may be at a shelter home for any reason, but the alternative family care at our institutions is lacking. Understanding of children is very important," said Sharma.

"There has to be better coordination among partner organisations working on child rights like police, CWC, NGOs and government-run institutions and a separate tracking mechanism for trafficking," Sharma added.

Anisha awaits the day when she will finally be able to complete the picture on her slate board, and say where she came from.

"Didi (the caretaker) tells me, my parents will find me...But now I like this home," she said, shying away, with her eyes fixed on a rusted iron gate which reads - 'Welcome to the Kilkari Rainbow Home for Girls'.

Falak case just the tip of the iceberg

Sangita Jha/New Delhi

Story of the child has shook country’s conscience. Activists call for strong measures to end trafficking

Falak, a badly bruised and battered baby battling for life at All India Institute ofMedical Sciences (AIIMS), has become the face of unabated human trafficking menace in the country. After hitting the national headlines and occupying the prime time on TV channels, she has silently become just another patient at the premier institution. This tells the sickening tale of human trafficking which has accounted for millions of Falaks over the years but there remains to end to their saga of pain.

Union home ministry very promptly had judged that plight of two-year-old baby Falak was a case of human trafficking. Falak was brought to the AIIMS on January 18 with severe head injury, both her arms broken, bite marks all over her body and her cheeks branded with hot iron. Immediately after her admission, doctors conducted a life saving surgery on her brain and another two were undertaken at a later date. Doctors said that she needs to undergo more such surgeries but they have been put on hold as infection level in her blood has not receded. After the media cornered the police, investigations appear to have laid bare the gory details of the infant's saga. The police traced her mutilated fate to cases of unabated human trafficking in Rajasthan.

Investigators said Falak's mother is also a member of a racket which dupe people in the name of marriage. Falak's mother Munni was sold to a youth in Jhunjhunu village for Rs 2.7 lakh. Now that she has been arrested by the Delhi Police and her truth exposed, the youth and his family is feeling cheated.

It has come to the light that Harpal and Mukesh Katewa were also victims of human trafficking. Harpal, who hails from Bhadaunda village in Jhunjhunu got married in September 2011 to Falak's mother Munni, who at the time was under the name Anita. Harpal has since been telling all those who want to listen to his story that he had paid Rs 2.7 lakh in two installments for marrying Anita, alias Munni, and later came to know that she had already been married and had three children apart from having undergone tubectomy.

Falak is just a tip of the iceberg. Selling a woman for the sake of marriage is, however, one part of the human trafficking saga. The other part is of course the dark alleys of sex trade in which girls trafficked from different parts of the country are pushed into.

A number of NGOs have well documented India as a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation. A number of NGOs working for United Nations have reported internal forced labour constituting India's largest trafficking problem. They claim that men, women, and children are held in debt bondage and face forced labour working in brick kilns, rice mills, agriculture, and embroidery factories.

In the last two decades the worsening sex ratio in most of the northern states, including Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi, have further added to the booming racket of illicit trafficking of women for sex and marriages. Children on the other hand are subjected to begging and in some instances they had been found to have been used as armed combatants by terrorist groups.

This is in addition to heavy inflow of women and girls from Nepal and Bangladesh trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation in various cities of India. Indian women on the other hand have been found to be trafficked to the Middle East for commercial sexual exploitation.

The government prohibits some forms of trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation through the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act (ITPA). Prescribed penalties under the ITPA - ranging from seven years' to life imprisonment - are sufficiently stringent and commensurate with those for other grave crimes. However, these laws appear to be ineffectually enforced.

Human trafficking cases appear to be flourishing for the reason that the palms of the law enforcement agencies and officials are greased enough that they turn a blind eye to the continuance of the worst kind of crime against humanity.

Delhi fails in child labour rehabilitation

Laws fail to deter the pernicious practice in national Capital

Sopan Correspondent / New Delhi

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has said that the Delhi government has failed to take proper action for rescue and rehabilitation of child labourers.

In a submission to the Delhi High Court, the child rights body sought appropriate directions to government authorities while informing the court that rescued children are not being properly rehabilitated.

In its affidavit, the NCPRC said, "There is no guarantee that all rescued child labourers have been successfully restored to their families in the source states. This is evident from a study of 22 rescued child labourers in which three are not traceable and addresses of four children were wrong," the NCPRC said. It said that efforts to rescue child labourers were not being taken up seriously by the Labour Department and Sub-Divisional Magistrates.

"There is no definite feedback regarding proper rehabilitation of all rescued child labourers. Complaints about engagement of child labourers from NGOs are not acted upon promptly. In fact there have been inordinate delays on the part of task force to act upon such complaints," it said.

The affidavit was filed to inform the court about the steps taken by the government after a slew of directions were given by the High Court for the rescue and rehabilitation of child labourers in the city.

The High court had in 2009 passed a detailed order which modified the existing provisions for better rehabilitation of child labourers. It had given Delhi Police extra powers, which were earlier with the Labour Department, to effectively eradicate the problem. "We direct that the responsibility of lodging a police complaint against a person, employing child labour, would lie with the Delhi Police and not the Labour Department," it had said, asking the police to recover Rs 20,000 from the offenders as penalty without waiting for a "conviction order of the offending employer".

The submission of the NCPRC has come as a shock to the Delhi government officials. On condition of anonymity, a senior official said that they do all they can under the conditions but there are certain issues which cannot be resolved at the state government level. “We have a process of restoring the children in which help from the police and the state government where the child has to be sent is sought. In some cases, we do not get the requisite cooperation. It is not fair to put the entire onus on us,” the official said.

Most of the child labourers in Delhi work in industries like Zari, stitching, embroidery etc. where deft and supple hands are needed to do the work. The child labourers are rescued on a routine in the city by the enforcement agencies in association with the NGOs working for the children.

A lot of them work as domestic helps and also in the eating joints in the city. Though there is no dearth of laws to protect the rights of the children, the enforcement is often found to be lacking. Officials admit that the rehabilitation process is extremely time-consuming and their prime responsibility is to send back the children to the states from where they came.

Ironically, there have been several instances where the children, once rescued and sent back to their parents in their native states, come back again to the city and start working in the same industry. Activists say that extreme poverty often forces their parents to send back their children to work as child labourers, some even in hazardous units where they work for 14-16 hours a day.

Rescued children in the embroidery and zari industry have narrated their woes and suffering. They have told their rescuers that they work in small, unhygienic and poorly ventilated units, merely for food and learn the skills. They are deprived of education, recreation and live in unhealthy conditions due to poverty and also coercion in several cases.
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