#dnaEdit: Capital’s shame

In a three-part series, dna has exposed the weak policing and oversight mechanisms that are aiding organised rackets in trafficking children from India’s poorest tribal districts to posh and middle-class homes in Delhi. These networks connecting Gumla, Khunti and Simdega districts in Jharkhand and the state capital, Ranchi, with the national capital, New Delhi, have been functioning right under the nose of the Delhi and Jharkhand Police for years.

In Delhi, most of these traffickers have cloaked themselves in a measure of respectability by running what are euphemistically known as “placement agencies”. These agencies enter into contracts with employers and collect paychecks on behalf of these children, paying only a pittance, if at all, to the “workers” or their parents back home. And as the case of Phulin Murmu, 18, who was subject to extreme abuse and torture in a posh South Delhi locality shows, neither the state, nor these agencies, or their families have any means to track the working conditions at the employers’ end. One of the few major catches for the Delhi Police, Panna Lal Mahto, is alleged to have trafficked 5,000 children, with interrogation records indicating that he cultivated and flaunted connections with Jharkhand and national politicians. dna also located FIRs against many of these “slave traders” in both Jharkhand and Delhi on child-trafficking charges. However, it is suspicious that these criminals are yet to face trial. 

Perhaps, it is the inter-state nature of the operations and the difficulty of inter-agency coordination that has allowed the rackets to flourish. dna also found that one train, the Jharkhand Sampark Kranti Express, departing from Ranchi around midnight and arriving at Delhi the next night, with just seven stops in between, and five of them in the first night, was favoured by the traffickers. Forget inter-agency, the newspaper found that neither the Railway Protection Force nor the Jharkhand and Delhi Police wings were making any intra-agency effort to understand why and where so many young children were undertaking such long journeys. The apathy travels further up the state hierarchy with the Union minister of state Mansukhbhai Vasava pleading ignorance about the issue. Vasava’s senior in the ministry, Jual Oram, and Oram’s predecessor in the UPA government, Kishore Chandra Deo, have taken tough stances on protecting the forest land rights of tribals, but not done enough to end trafficking. Perhaps, the former being an emotive and heavily politicised issue while the latter involves children, who without the right to vote, fail to become a constituency for politicians, could be the reason for such skewed priorities.

In Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, India now has a mascot capable of swinging the public and media discourse on child labour. But his achievement is also a reflection of the nature of our State which has ceded its responsibility towards children and vulnerable sections to NGOs. It is increasingly NGOs rather than the police or social welfare departments that are taking up vigilance activities to spot such children and operating rehabilitation centres to repatriate them. In September, Delhi issued an executive order mandating that all placement agencies must register with the labour department in 30 days, issue passbooks to domestic workers containing personal details and salary entries, and ensure that written agreements would be signed between the employer and worker failing which penalties of Rs50,000 would be imposed. It is still early days for this order, but it is doubtful whether supervision can improve because the Delhi labour department is woefully understaffed. However, the presence of a robust NGO network in the Capital who can act as whistleblowers offers hope of incremental improvements.