Child Chained In Plain Sight, Rescued From Delhi Restaurant

India: A child trafficked from his native village of Sehjana Kaparanda in the Katihar district of Bihar has been rescued from two months of being kept shackled to his post in a Delhi roadside restaurant.

The boy's father had been searching for his missing boy for weeks, having learned that a fellow villager had trafficked the child to India's capital city, Delhi. Having come so close, he was still far from finding, and rescuing, his son, as the local bureaucracy paid little attention to his pleas for assistance, sending him on a fruitless merry-go-round of visits to police station after police station. It's hard to imagine the degree of despair and grief that must have afflicted the father at this time; even after receiving a tip on the restaurant holding his son captive, he was not able to melt the government's icebound bureaucratic indifference. His son remained in chains.

Thankfully, the case came to the attention of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) ["Save The Childhood Movement"], a private Indian organization dedicated to freeing India's children from bonded labor. The BBA have rescued over 70,000 children from slavery since the group's founding in the 1980s. Their experience allowed them to navigate the sea of red tape and got the father's complaint filed with the appropriate child labor agency, resulting in a rescue operation mounted against the restaurant and its heartless owner.

The indifference met by the desperate father is nothing compared to what the son witnessed during his captivity:

“I was working in this Dhaba for last 3 months. One day, he accused me of stealing Rs. 50,000 from his home and started torturing me physically. A fortnight ago, he decided to tether me with iron chains. I could move in the radius of one metre only and worked for more than 15 hours a day without any protection from the cold weather. Police personnel kept coming to the Dhaba and mocked at me. There is a mosque just opposite, even the people saw me like this everyday after their morning and evening prayers. Nobody came for my rescue”.

BBA's Chairperson, Professor Rama Shankar Chaurasia, draws a sobering conclusion from the child's rescue:

“A child found chained in the heart of national capital is a serious issue. It goes on to show how little concern we have for children of our society..."

It staggers the imagination to think that police officers in India's capital city can see a child wearing these shackles, and their reaction is... to mock him??

[Image courtesy of BBA's news report on the story]

[UPDATE: Some background to the rampant corruption stalling efforts to free India's slaves provided by Youngbee Kim at the Northfolk Human Rights Examiner]