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The Mumbai Crime Branch has put four more women behind the bars on Tuesday in connection with the child trafficking racket that illicitly sold a minimum of 14 children to childless couples. The four women were taken into custody from Visakhapatnam, bringing the total number of arrested suspects in the case to 14, with 12 of them being women.
According to the police, following their interrogation, two children were rescued on Tuesday – an eight-month-old baby girl from Visakhapatnam and a two-year-old boy from Akola district in Maharashtra. Additionally, two 2-year-old children were rescued from Malad and Ratnagiri on April 27. These children were reportedly sold to couples in April 2023 and December 2022 for ₹2 lakh and ₹5 lakh, respectively.
Ragasudha R, deputy commissioner of police, crime branch, stated, “All four children rescued by the crime branch are currently under the care of a private orphanage.”
Earlier, on Monday, Unit 2 of the crime branch detained three women – Poonam Santosh Kharade, 29, from Asalpha village in Ghatkopar, Rina Rajkishore Gupta, 2o from Nalasopara, and Swati Shadeo Bhaira, from Naigaon. They were accused of selling three infants under two months to childless couples in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam with the help of egg donor Sneha Suryavanshi, who was arrested on April 27 along with six others.
During questioning, Kharade admitted to knowing Suryavanshi through a mutual acquaintance and confessed to selling a 15-day-old girl to a couple in Hyderabad for ₹2 lakh in February this year. Gupta, who had previously worked with Suryavanshi, arranged for a three-month-old baby girl to be sold in March for ₹1.4 lakh, as per the officer’s statement.
The police officer stated that during further questioning, Bhaira disclosed that she had also acquired a one-month-old baby girl from Ulhasnagar and sold her to a couple in Hyderabad through Suryavanshi for ₹4 lakh in March this year. Efforts are being made to identify the biological parents of the children and locate the parents who purchased them.
The crime branch’s Unit 2 arrested seven suspects, which included five women and a doctor, on April 27, dismantling a syndicate engaged in the alleged trafficking of 14 children aged between one month and 4 years over the last 1.5 years.
Underworld of child trafficking in India
According to a report by India Today, Madhya Pradesh radesh and Rajasthan are one of the hotspots of child trafficking in India. In these states people openly trade their own children on a permanent or contractual basis. In a sting operation conducted by India Today, they encountered many people who sell or rent their own children or any other child in the family to their so- called customers, and charge an amount of money on it. As per one of the sellers’, they use this money to fulfill their basic necessities like shopping, buying groceries, and repairing houses, etc. Rising poverty, lack of education, fewer jobs, negligence of government and poor police system are one of the root causes behind this increasing child trafficking.
Shocking statistics about the child trafficking in India
The data indicates that child trafficking remains a significant problem in the country. In 2021, India documented 59,544 cases of missing minor girls, making a 30.8% increase from the previous year. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, human trafficking cases in the same year rose to 2,189 with 2,877 of the victims being children.
