NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Indian police rescued 63 children and arrested 23 alleged traffickers at Old Delhi railway station on Wednesday in the first joint operation of its kind between anti-trafficking and railway police and an activist group set up to free trafficked children.
The police operation was launched after the activist group Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) reported receiving a tipoff that a group of traffickers and their victims were heading for Delhi by train from the northern town of Raxaul in Bihar state, the BBA said in a press release.
The children were aged between 7 and 17 and most were from the northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the BBA said. The traffickers had told their parents the children would work in factories in Delhi and other cities and would be able to send money home regularly, it added. The group was set up to rescue victims of bonded labour.
“I was told that a lot of money would be given to me once I reached Punjab,” an 8-year-old boy in the group told the BBA. “They tried very hard to convince me that a better life awaited me.”
“I was promised education in one of the madrasas (religious schools) in Delhi and was also assured of a job in a factory,” said a rescued 13-year-old boy.
BBA founder Kailash Satyarthi, who alerted the police to the gang’s plans, expressed serious concern about the rise in child trafficking in India.
“This is the single largest operation to free trafficked children in transit,” he said. “Among those children who have been rescued from the clutches of traffickers today, the youngest one is barely seven. He was being trafficked from Bihar to be sold as a tea-boy in Jind (Haryana). At a time when a former tea-boy has dared his detractors by becoming the prime minister of India, look at the travesty that traffickers are executing such heinous crimes right under the nose of GRP in the capital of the world's largest democracy.”
Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi, who stormed to victory in national elections last week, began working as a child as a tea-boy on station platforms.
Thousands of Indian children, mostly from poor rural areas, are taken to the cities every year by gangs who sell them into bopnded labour or hire them out to unscrupulous employers after promising to send their parents some or all of their wages.
The BBA said none of those rescued on Wednesday had ever attended school, and said an initial investigation had shown that several of the men arrested had supplied child labourers to factories before.
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