India’s child protection officers held in trafficking investigation

Two child protection officers have been arrested for alleged links with a trafficking gang that ran illegal adoption centres in eastern India selling children to foreign couples, police said yesterday. Investigators said children aged between six months and 14 years were sold in illegal adoptions to couples from Europe, America and Asia for between $12,000 and $23,000 and taken out of the country.

While India has an estimated 30 million orphans, legal adoption is rare because of strict rules governing the practice and there is a thriving illicit market. Police arrested two Darjeeling child protection officials, Mrinal Ghosh and Debasish Chanda, on Friday “for their links with the adoption scandal”, Nishat Parvej of the state’s Criminal Investigation Department said. He said three more government officials had “absconded”, as the widening inquiry into the adoption racket embroils political and administrative figures. So far six people have been nabbed over the scandal, including Juhi Choudhury, a senior member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party in West Bengal.

The head of the adoption centre at the heart of the scandal, Chandana Chakraborty, told investigators that Choudhury had been involved in child trafficking for several years. Police arrested Chakraborty, a retired school principal, and her deputy Sonali Mondal last month after a tipoff from the federal adoption agency. The pair ran the Bimala Sishu Griha centre where children were sold abroad through forged documents to couples for as much as 1.5 million rupees ($23,000).