Investigations into the Namakkal child adoption racket have shown that the gang exploited gaps in health and registration services to provide an almost one-stop service for childless couples.
NAMAKKAL: The Namakkal child adoption racket that recently came to light has revealed how lapses in health and registration services could be exploited by unscrupulous individuals. It has also shown how brokers were able to target childless couples as well as poor families with too many children.
In fact, if investigators are to be believed, the accused were successful as they leveraged contacts to provide a virtually one-stop service for childless couples. Using contacts with health officials, they were able to target poor women and sell their eggs to fertility clinics in the region.
Through the connection built through sale of the eggs, they were able to allegedly find childless couples for whom fertility treatments hadn’t worked and offered to sell them babies instead. Through contacts with health officials, they were able to know which babies had been born at which government hospital to what kind of families and thereby narrow in on vulnerable families that they would allegedly convince to give up their babies. The racket, which has allegedly gone on for years, only came to light last week after an audio recording of a retired government nursing assistant offering to sell babies went viral.
After detaining the woman, Amuthavalli, for questioning, police arrested her and her husband Ravichandran, who worked at an urban cooperative bank, as well as one Sengarai who was an ambulance driver at the Kolli Hills primary health centre. So far eight people have been arrested under several sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act of 2015. As many as 14 children who had been sold into illegal adoption had been traced in Erode, Coimbatore, Tirunelveli, Kanniyakumari and Madurai districts.