Baby trafficking seems to have become an integral part of Bengal’s routine healthcare service. The cruel reality resurfaced with four arrests made from Burdwan and Midnapore on charges of infant trafficking over the past two days.
While in the first case three people including a hospital owner and two ayahs were on Monday detained for their alleged involvement selling infants in the second instance an ayah was on Tuesday caught red-handed by the police in Midnapore Medical College while she was selling off a newborn baby to decoys set up by the men in uniform.
In Burdwan the police arrested Rawsana Begam an attendant of a nursing home even as she was trying to sell out a baby for `10,000. The police also detained Sadhan Kumar Ghatak the owner and Asha Mitra an attendant of the nursing home, said ASP Dyutiman Bhattacharya, adding “we are investigating the matter.”
The second incident came to the fore in Midnapore Medical College where the police arrested an ayah for trying to sell off a baby for `5,000. “There were reports of such trafficking coming from the place and the police laid a trap and arrested her,” a senior officer said.
The two incidents came almost in tandem with the ones that unfolded in North 24 Parganas and Kolkata where the police arrested more than a dozen people including two doctors, para-medics, NGO operatives, court clerks for selling away newborns from hospitals after informing their mothers that they had given birth to still-born babies.
While some of these infants were buried inside the courtyard of the said NGO after they perished in transit others were kept inside an old-age home packed in biscuit packets: weak and malnourished waiting for their customers.
The police are trying to find whether there was a common thread joining all the incidents of infant-trafficking. This, even as a top police officer said at least 50 infants could have been trafficked out not only of Kolkata and Bengal but also to countries beyond Asia.
Meanwhile, the opposition Congress and the BJP demanded CBI investigation into the matter alleging, “such organised rackets could not have run for the past so many years without the connivance of political leadership and the administration.”
