Windjammer
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Rajkumar Mahto of Kirari village in West Delhi lives in a single room by an open gutter with his wife, Hema Devi, and two daughters. Contact with the sewage appears to be the cause of the sores on the childrens faces and bodies. But Mahto says they have broken out because they are worried. The children, he explains, havent seen their 8-year-old sister, Kajal, since April 21, 2010.
She wanted ice cream, said Mr. Mahto, who is tall and bucktoothed, and sells secondhand clothes from a cart. My wife told her to wait a minute, shed come along. But Kajal was too eager. We never saw her again.
Kajal Mahto is now part of an ominous statistic. Between January 2008 and October 2010, 13,570 children were reported missing in Delhi. The numbers are based on police reports gathered by a Delhi-based non-profit, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or the Save the Childhood Movement.
Some of the children who were eventually found spoke of being taken by force or of being enticed with promises of food and clothes. But they were then sold into various forms of slavery, including domestic labor, beggary, agricultural labor or commercial sex work.
While statistics on a subject like this can never be entirely accurate, given the nature of the crimes involved, a recent U.S. Department of Labor report said that in India forced child labor is a problem practiced in its worst forms. A provisional Indian census report released in 2010 estimated that 1 in 10 workers in India are children.
Staggering as they appear, experts say these figures may be conservative.
Conversations with the parents of missing children reveal that the police are often dismissive of poor families who report a missing child. Almost all of Delhis missing children live in slums or unregistered colonies.
One parent I spoke to was told by the police, You cant feed the dozens of children you produce. Of course theyll run away!
Failure to react to reports of missing children has already resulted in tragedy. In 2007, officials found 17 bodies, including those of several children in the sewers behind the home of a wealthy businessman in Noida, a city just east of New Delhi. Residents of a nearby slum, Nithari, had complained about missing children for more than two years, yet, the police took no action. A total of 38 children had gone missing in that case.
Eerily, Kiradi is only a short auto-rickshaw drive from Nithari. And Kajal is one of five children who disappeared from her neighborhood last year.
On April 6, 2010, 16 days before Kajal disappeared, Iqbal and Shabnam Alis only child, 9-year-old Irfan, disappeared. He was playing with his friends a few streets away from the house, the same place they always congregated to play football, Mr. Ali said. His friends saw him, and then, suddenly, they didnt.
It took the police two days to file a report, Mr. Ali said. Their first response was he probably ran away because you scold him too much. So we realized wed have to search for him ourselves. Till today we get phone calls from people who claim to have seen him somewhere in the city. I gather my friends, we rush out on our scooters, but nothing.
The Alis used to supply biscuits to a local bakery. After Irfan disappeared they stopped working, and spent a large part of their time and much of their savings on distributing fliers with his photograph.
Children get kidnapped around here all the time, Mrs. Ali said. A boy was kidnapped in February 2011. He says he went to play and then he remembers nothing. He was found months later roaming around the local train station. Since his return all hes done is sleep and eat. If you try and talk to him he looks at you like he wants to kill you.
Iqbal wasnt the only child who disappeared from the area on April 6, 2010. Barsa, a 7-year-old girl went missing the same day. A little more than a month later it was 9-year-old Buriyas turn. Kajal was next. The last child who disappeared in the neighborhood last year was a 3 1/2-year-old girl named Muskaan.
When I sought to find out about the status of the investigations into these missing children, the local police refused to speak to me. The parents of the missing children say they havent heard from the police since the first few weeks after they filed their complaints.
In June this year, 8-year-old Neha, who lives in a village near Kirari, was abducted and taken to Agra where she was locked in a room along with three young boys and a girl. She was told she would be sent to Dubai. Neha was recovered because her abductor, a woman named Kajal who lived close by and whom Neha knew well enough to refer to as Kajal Aunty, was brazen enough to return to her neighborhood the next day, possibly to abduct another child. She was recognized as the last person to be seen with Neha, surrounded, and beaten by residents. Although she was arrested and admitted that she abducted children, she was allowed to leave the police station. She hasnt been seen since.
Mr. Mahto hopes a similar break will return his daughter to him. He said every day without her provides wrenching pain.
A few years ago Kajal fell very ill, he said. If she had died then, it wouldnt have felt as painful as it does now.
Thousands of children are missing in Delhi, India. - NYTimes.com
She wanted ice cream, said Mr. Mahto, who is tall and bucktoothed, and sells secondhand clothes from a cart. My wife told her to wait a minute, shed come along. But Kajal was too eager. We never saw her again.
Kajal Mahto is now part of an ominous statistic. Between January 2008 and October 2010, 13,570 children were reported missing in Delhi. The numbers are based on police reports gathered by a Delhi-based non-profit, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or the Save the Childhood Movement.
Some of the children who were eventually found spoke of being taken by force or of being enticed with promises of food and clothes. But they were then sold into various forms of slavery, including domestic labor, beggary, agricultural labor or commercial sex work.
While statistics on a subject like this can never be entirely accurate, given the nature of the crimes involved, a recent U.S. Department of Labor report said that in India forced child labor is a problem practiced in its worst forms. A provisional Indian census report released in 2010 estimated that 1 in 10 workers in India are children.
Staggering as they appear, experts say these figures may be conservative.
Conversations with the parents of missing children reveal that the police are often dismissive of poor families who report a missing child. Almost all of Delhis missing children live in slums or unregistered colonies.
One parent I spoke to was told by the police, You cant feed the dozens of children you produce. Of course theyll run away!
Failure to react to reports of missing children has already resulted in tragedy. In 2007, officials found 17 bodies, including those of several children in the sewers behind the home of a wealthy businessman in Noida, a city just east of New Delhi. Residents of a nearby slum, Nithari, had complained about missing children for more than two years, yet, the police took no action. A total of 38 children had gone missing in that case.
Eerily, Kiradi is only a short auto-rickshaw drive from Nithari. And Kajal is one of five children who disappeared from her neighborhood last year.
On April 6, 2010, 16 days before Kajal disappeared, Iqbal and Shabnam Alis only child, 9-year-old Irfan, disappeared. He was playing with his friends a few streets away from the house, the same place they always congregated to play football, Mr. Ali said. His friends saw him, and then, suddenly, they didnt.
It took the police two days to file a report, Mr. Ali said. Their first response was he probably ran away because you scold him too much. So we realized wed have to search for him ourselves. Till today we get phone calls from people who claim to have seen him somewhere in the city. I gather my friends, we rush out on our scooters, but nothing.
The Alis used to supply biscuits to a local bakery. After Irfan disappeared they stopped working, and spent a large part of their time and much of their savings on distributing fliers with his photograph.
Children get kidnapped around here all the time, Mrs. Ali said. A boy was kidnapped in February 2011. He says he went to play and then he remembers nothing. He was found months later roaming around the local train station. Since his return all hes done is sleep and eat. If you try and talk to him he looks at you like he wants to kill you.
Iqbal wasnt the only child who disappeared from the area on April 6, 2010. Barsa, a 7-year-old girl went missing the same day. A little more than a month later it was 9-year-old Buriyas turn. Kajal was next. The last child who disappeared in the neighborhood last year was a 3 1/2-year-old girl named Muskaan.
When I sought to find out about the status of the investigations into these missing children, the local police refused to speak to me. The parents of the missing children say they havent heard from the police since the first few weeks after they filed their complaints.
In June this year, 8-year-old Neha, who lives in a village near Kirari, was abducted and taken to Agra where she was locked in a room along with three young boys and a girl. She was told she would be sent to Dubai. Neha was recovered because her abductor, a woman named Kajal who lived close by and whom Neha knew well enough to refer to as Kajal Aunty, was brazen enough to return to her neighborhood the next day, possibly to abduct another child. She was recognized as the last person to be seen with Neha, surrounded, and beaten by residents. Although she was arrested and admitted that she abducted children, she was allowed to leave the police station. She hasnt been seen since.
Mr. Mahto hopes a similar break will return his daughter to him. He said every day without her provides wrenching pain.
A few years ago Kajal fell very ill, he said. If she had died then, it wouldnt have felt as painful as it does now.
Thousands of children are missing in Delhi, India. - NYTimes.com
