Fake Indian charity caught selling babies in adoption racket

Delhi: Indian policemen walked into the offices of a fake Delhi charity this week to find a two-year-old boy and a newborn baby waiting to be taken.

The newborn belonged to an impoverished couple selling their baby son in return for money. The toddler, say police, was probably abducted by the trio running the so-called charity.

"What we unearthed was a sophisticated racket. The three have admitted they sold about 23 babies for around 550,000 rupees ($11,100) each.

"The culprits included the two men and woman running the Rashtriya Janhit Jansewa Sansthan (National Welfare Service Association) charity but also hospitals, nursing staff and municipal officers. The couples who registered knew what they were doing was illegal," said Deependra Pathak, Joint Commissioner of Police for South-West Delhi.

Indian Red Cross Society workers hold abandoned baby boys found at a drop-off box at the entrance to the Red Cross House in Amritsar on June 9. The premises contains a drop-off location for unwanted babies.

Indian Red Cross Society workers hold abandoned baby boys found at a drop-off box at the entrance to the Red Cross House in Amritsar on June 9. The premises contains a drop-off location for unwanted babies.CREDIT:AFP

When the police in Dwarka, a West Delhi suburb, became suspicious about the fake charity, they sent a decoy couple pretending to be desperate to adopt a child. During visits spread over three weeks, the couple learnt how the gang operated.

Under the scheme, the adoptive mother-to-be would be admitted into a private hospital, usually in a slum area. A couple of days later, she would be discharged, with false papers saying she had given birth to a baby. On leaving, she would be given a municipal birth certificate for her "newborn".

Other couples were given children who had been stolen or kidnapped.

Since the decoy mother refused to be admitted to hospital, the gang called the couple to the office on June 8 to choose between the two-year-old boy (who had a higher price) and the newborn.

The couple chose the toddler, paid for him, then gave the signal to the police waiting outside to come in and raid the premises. In the ensuing melee, the birth parents of the newborn fled with him.

Police say the fake charity's database shows that about 75 couples, all believed to be Indian, had registered and were waiting for a baby. These couples will now be tracked down, along with the other 23 couples.

Such rackets flourish in India owing to a combination of circumstances. About 30 million children are orphans but the adoption procedures are painful and prolonged. It can take five to six years for a couple to adopt.

Last year, government figures showed that only 2500 children were legally adopted, a figure a government official called 'shameful'. There are no official figures on the number of illegal adoption agencies, but insiders say there are "many".

Couples desperate for a child often resort to illegal methods. Their desperation is matched by that of indescribably poor couples prepared to sell their baby. Gangs bring these two groups together to make money out of their need.

Apart from illegal adoptions, children are trafficked for sale to employers as cheap workers, with many rural girls lured by the prospect of being given jobs as maids in the cities but ending up in brothels.

In the capital alone, police say 17 to 20 children vanish every day. The walls of slums are full of photocopied pictures of children put up by parents who suddenly found they had gone missing while playing or on an errand.

The parents of these missing children spend their days going from police station to police station asking for information about their child.

While Mr Pathak has some sympathy for couples driven by poverty to sell their baby, he has none for the couples who took children from the gang.

"They knew the baby would be bought or stolen and that a child would have been abducted. They need to be punished severely," said Mr Pathak.

The most painful question is what happens when police find the 23 babies and children who have been sold. Couples will have to give up their child. If the children have been in their adoptive home for a while, they will have become attached to their new parents.

Vijaya Raina, director of SOS Children's Villages, an adoption agency registered with the government, said the children faced "heartbreak".

"Imagine, they will become orphans a second time. The poor two-year-old boy is now in a care home. Imagine how uprooted children will feel if they have spent a year or two with the parents and are now taken away?" she asked.

Probably to fool the neighbours in this rather scruffy and dusty neighbourhood in West Delhi full of new ugly concrete apartment blocks, the operators put up a sign saying 'Fastrack [sic] International' on the front door of their ground-floor office.

Neighbours say the flat, now padlocked by the police, was rented only two months ago and received a lot of visitors of all ages but otherwise seemed normal.

Two doors away is a playgroup called Unique Kids Care where children aged between 18 months and five years are chanting Ring a Ring o' Roses. Its owner, Rekha Saraswat, is stunned to discover what her neighbours were doing to children just like the ones in her care.

"My children here were so close I can't believe it. If the weather is nice they play in the park opposite. I had no idea," she said.

The fake charity operators, Vinod Kumar, 42, Shiksha Chowdhary, 28, and Anil Pandey, 29, have been arrested.

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