Rajesh was 14 when he disappeared. Beneath a mop of jet black hair, his clear brown eyes glance sideways out of the picture that is all his family have left of him.
He was his parents’ only son and they doted and relied on him. One morning in April last year, his mother, Sunita, asked him to go out to fetch water. She remembers him loading the empty plastic containers on to his cart and setting off cheerfully down the lane. It was the last time she saw him. Rajesh, like tens of thousands of other Indian children every year, had simply vanished.
“It would have been better that he died,” she says, tugging at her headscarf and dabbing at tears. “At least then I would have known, but now I don’t know whether he is alive or dead.”
Official figures show that 44,000 children disappear each year in India. Some are eventually recovered, but one in four remain untraced. Yet, with many parents reporting that police are reluctant to register cases or investigate and other parents complicit in the sale of their own children, the true figure is believed to be much higher — with some estimates of up to a million children every year.
Investigations by Indian authorities and aid agencies have found that many children are kidnapped and sold for adoption, into slavery, or worse. They believe that some end up in the UK.
A new report by India’s human rights commission says that while some of the children are killed almost immediately, others are “working as cheap forced labor in illegal factories/establishments/homes, exploited as sex slaves or forced into the child porn industry, as camel jockeys in the Gulf countries, as child beggars in begging rackets, as victims of illegal adoptions or forced marriages, or perhaps worse than any of these as victims of organ trade and even grotesque cannibalism.”
• Official figures record that 44,000 Indian children go missing every year and 11,000 are never traced.
• There are more than 400 million children in India.
• A UNICEF report claims trafficking in people occurs in the majority of the countries in South Asia.
• According to the Delhi-based National Center for Missing Children, prospective parents from Western countries have paid up to US$7,500 to adopt a child.
• There are an estimated 11 million abandoned children in India.
Every day there are pictures in the classified sections of children who have vanished. “Search for kidnapped boy,” one ad began last week. “Abhayjeet Singh, 13, 5’2’. Kidnapped on 13 August in Prashant Vihar.”
Hundreds more are listed in the books of organizations trying to help the parents who search for years in the hope of finding their lost children: Anikat, eight months old, missing since July 2003; Sultana, 5, disappeared in 2007; Nitesh Kumar, 7; Sunita, 5 ... the list goes on.
The plight of the disappeared has been brought home to India by revelations about the abduction and sale of children, often to order. An adoption agency and orphanage trading in Chennai as Malaysian Social Services is accused of acquiring children from criminal gangs who had taken them from the poorest parts of southern India.
The children were renamed and prospective adoptive parents were presented with faked pictures of mothers they believed were offering the children up for adoption. Seven people have been arrested after some of the children were found in Australia. A previous investigation into another Indian agency revealed that two children adopted by an Australian couple had been sold by their drunken and abusive father without their mother’s knowledge for the equivalent of US$40.
India has a huge problem with orphanages crammed with genuinely unwanted children; it is estimated that there are 11 million abandoned children in the country. Last year the Indian government’s Central Adoption Resource Authority announced that it planned to make international adoption easier, especially for British parents.
RSS