Poverty-stricken, jobless Hyd couple tries to sell infant son for ₹22,000

nHYDERABAD: Poverty and lack of work during the lockdown drove a migrant couple in Hyderabad to try and sell their two-month old son for ₹22,000 through a mediator on Sunday.

Jeedimetla police arrested the couple, Madan Kumar Singh, 32, and Saritha, 30, of Uttar Pradesh, who came to Hyderabad a few years ago to work as construction labourers.another woman, identified as Seshu, who was brokering the deal, was also taken into custody. The child was the couple’s second son; the first is seven years old.

“We have rescued the child and shifted him to Sishu Vihar being run by the women and child welfare department authorities,” P V Padmaja Reddy, deputy commissioner of police of Balanagar, said . She said enquiries revealed that the couple was in acute poverty. “We are investigating as to whether there were any other reasons for the sale of the child,” the DCP said.

Jeedimetla police said the couple had apparently thought they would not be able to raise the second child. The child’s mother told the police that her husband was also used to consuming alcohol and was pestering her for money to buy liquor.

“The couple managed to find a broker Seshu, known to the couple, who reportedly found a childless couple who agreed to buy the child for Rs 22,000. On receiving a tipoff, we caught Seshu, who was taking the child for a medical examination,” a police officer said.

Andhra Pradesh Balala Hakkula Sangham (child rights association) president P Achyuta Rao said it was the responsibility of the state government to come to the rescue of daily-wage workers who were in extreme poverty because of the lockdown. “The department of women and child welfare should launch an awareness campaign about the cradle scheme among the poor people who were resorting to selling of new-born babies,” he said.

nMUMBAI: A few days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the national lockdown on March 24, Kailash Tandel received a call for help.

The 36-year-old had recently started work on a doctoral thesis at the Indian Institute of Technology-bombay, and Bhagwan Vival often ferried him in his auto rickshaw inside campus. Vival, in his 40s and a resident of the eastern suburb of Chandivli, wasn’t making enough money to run his household, he told Tandel.

Mumbai may be the Indian city worst hit by Covid-19 today, but even in March the effects of the pandemic were being felt n the metropolis. Businesses large and small had closed and public transport, including threewheelers, had gone off the streets Tandel, who is visually impaired, decided to turn to his institutional department to raise funds for the driver; within a day, he collected ₹5,000. That’s when he decided to do this on a larger scale.

A first-generation doctoral scholar in his family, Tandel

belongs to the Koli community — one of the oldest surviving indigenous communities of the islands that were reclaimed and stitched up to form the city of Mumbai as we know it today.traditionally, the community earns through fishing, but the lockdown had put a stop to it. “Some fisherfolk have started fishing for either self-consumption or selling their wares at a small-scale level but unless the markets open, there will be no business,” said Tandel, whose father Ganjan and brother Harshad, are fishermen.

“Initially I waited to see if political representatives or community leaders are reaching out to the Koli communities. When I saw there was no help coming, I started collecting funds to help the fisherfolk,” said Tandel, who sought funds from colleagues, connections to networks through his earlier alma mater, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and ration kits from the nongovernmental