Joint Commissioner of Police (crime), Sanjay Saxena said, "As soon as a baby is found, we rush them to hospital. We also start to search for the person who abandoned the child."
In the last six years, the Mumbai police has been able to trace the parents of abandoned infants and children in the city in less than a fifth of the cases registered of child abandonment. Statistics provided by police revealed that from 2010 till 2016, there have been 147 cases wherein infants and children have been found abandoned, of which in only 26 cases, the police have been able to trace the parents. The detection rate in these cases in the last six years has been only 17.86%. The figures also negate the common perception that most abandoned infants and children are girls. The statistics highlight the fact that in the last six years, 81 male infants and children were found abandoned in the city, compared to 66 female infants and children.
In 2016, the number of cases registered for abandoning a child under section 317 of the Indian Penal Code were 13, while of them, only five cases were detected, as compared to 18 cases registered in 2015, where only six were detected. Only 33 cases were registered in 2010, with police managing to trace childrens' parents in four cases.
Joint Commissioner of Police (crime), Sanjay Saxena said, "As soon as a baby is found, we rush them to hospital. We also start to search for the person who abandoned the child."
Speaking about the challenges in detecting such cases, Saxena added, "Since infants cannot identify who abandoned them, it makes our job difficult. In most cases, the culprit abandons the baby in other places at night. We check with private and government hospitals or with mid-wives if a woman had delivered a baby couple of days before the child was found abandoned. Our duty to prosecute the offender, while rehabilitation is taken care of by the NGO. It is important to nab the culprit."
Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Deven Bharti, said, "India does not have a DNA bank, making it difficult for us to detect such cases. Besides, sometimes there are no complainants. We take the help of witnesses to locate the culprit. In some cases, even connivance of hospitals in getting infants abandoned has come to light. Most of the abandoned children are between the age of two and three months."
Dr Asha Bajpai, a child rights lawyer and a professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, said, "In most cases, an unwed mother abandons her baby.
Also, if a child has a disability and if the parent is not financially stable, they may abandon the infant. In cases were the parents are not economically sound, the state should step in and provide more facilities to the family.
Besides, in other cases, more awareness is needed for contraception and early detection."
"It is a huge decision for a parent to abandon the child and hence it is difficult for us to judge under what circumstances a mother would have abandoned a child. Leaving the child outside an orphanage or an NGO is not the solution, but sensitisation is needed. We have seen cases that the infants have been eaten up by animals too. Now with CCTVs being installed across the city, we expect more cases of abandonment to come to light," Bharti added.
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