Recently there was a spate of media stories accusing the Roma community of being baby-snatchers and child thieves, trafficking children. It all proved false. However, once the racist anti-Roma headlines disappeared, the real problem of stolen children also disappeared from the news. Al Jazeera, nevertheless, carried this report.
There are more than 11.5 million abandoned children in India and its adoption authorities regularly urge western countries to adopt children from country's hundreds of orphanages. According to India's Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) about 1,000 Indian children go for adoption abroad with bulk of them going to the US. According to CARA guidelines a foreign couple adopting an Indian child should not pay more than $3500 in donation to the Indian orphanage. However, in reality, foreign parents often are forced to pay up to ten or twelve times more money to an Indian agency, making the "adoption business" very lucrative in India.
According to figures from India's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), one child goes missing in the country every eight minutes and forty per cent of these children are never found. Last year, India's minister of state for home affairs said in the parliament's upper house that 60,000 children had been reported missing in the country in 2011. According to Rakesh Senger, a researcher with the Indian child-rights NGO, BachpanBachaoAndolan, only half of the cases of missing children are reported to the NCRB.
"A good number of the lost children end up as prostitutes and bonded labourers or joins the homeless population in big cities," Senger told Al Jazeera. "Some of the missing children land in orphanages, and a percentage of those reach their adoptive families in India and abroad."
Nagarani's woke up, she found that one of her sons, Sathish, was missing. For years, her search yielded nothing, until the police busted a child trafficking network in south India in 2005. The traffickers confessed that they had secretly passed on several children, Sathish included, to a Chennai-based orphanage with a licence to offer children for adoption abroad. Investigations into the racket unearthed sordid details: the orphanage had sent at least 350 children for adoption abroad, having fudged the identities of some 100 of them. The orphanage had recorded Sathish under a false name, Anbu, who had been sent for adoption in the Netherlands The boy has been tracked down living with his adoptive parents.
She raised money and visited the Netherlands twice in an attempt to prove that she was Sathish's biological mother. But his adoptive parents – who had paid $35,000 to the orphanage for the adoption – refused to subject him to a DNA test. Dutch courts have refused to come to the rescue – ruling that a plea for DNA testing risked inflicting severe emotional trauma to the minor.
"What has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg," says Chennai's former police chief, R Natraj.
There are more than 11.5 million abandoned children in India and its adoption authorities regularly urge western countries to adopt children from country's hundreds of orphanages. According to India's Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) about 1,000 Indian children go for adoption abroad with bulk of them going to the US. According to CARA guidelines a foreign couple adopting an Indian child should not pay more than $3500 in donation to the Indian orphanage. However, in reality, foreign parents often are forced to pay up to ten or twelve times more money to an Indian agency, making the "adoption business" very lucrative in India.
According to figures from India's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), one child goes missing in the country every eight minutes and forty per cent of these children are never found. Last year, India's minister of state for home affairs said in the parliament's upper house that 60,000 children had been reported missing in the country in 2011. According to Rakesh Senger, a researcher with the Indian child-rights NGO, BachpanBachaoAndolan, only half of the cases of missing children are reported to the NCRB.
"A good number of the lost children end up as prostitutes and bonded labourers or joins the homeless population in big cities," Senger told Al Jazeera. "Some of the missing children land in orphanages, and a percentage of those reach their adoptive families in India and abroad."
Nagarani's woke up, she found that one of her sons, Sathish, was missing. For years, her search yielded nothing, until the police busted a child trafficking network in south India in 2005. The traffickers confessed that they had secretly passed on several children, Sathish included, to a Chennai-based orphanage with a licence to offer children for adoption abroad. Investigations into the racket unearthed sordid details: the orphanage had sent at least 350 children for adoption abroad, having fudged the identities of some 100 of them. The orphanage had recorded Sathish under a false name, Anbu, who had been sent for adoption in the Netherlands The boy has been tracked down living with his adoptive parents.
She raised money and visited the Netherlands twice in an attempt to prove that she was Sathish's biological mother. But his adoptive parents – who had paid $35,000 to the orphanage for the adoption – refused to subject him to a DNA test. Dutch courts have refused to come to the rescue – ruling that a plea for DNA testing risked inflicting severe emotional trauma to the minor.
"What has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg," says Chennai's former police chief, R Natraj.
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