In a major breakthrough, 19 minor boys including a visually-impaired child were rescued from the clutches of human traffickers in Guwahati on Wednesday. The officials of the Child line, Guwahati said this on Wednesday while adding that all the rescued children belong to 6 to 15 years of age and that they hail from Assam’s Barak Valley and Tripura. Police have also detained three persons for their alleged involvement in the trafficking of the children.
“We have approached the police on Wednesday after receiving information that some children were being trafficked out of the State. Accordingly, we raided the Guwahati Railway Station at Paltan Bazar area of the city and spotted the boys waiting to be boarded on a train,” Nirmal Deka, Coordinator of the Child line told media on Wednesday.
“We tried to talk to the children but they did not know as where they were going. We have taken their custody and they would be produced before the district children welfare committee soon,” Deka said.
A senior CID officer admitted the recovery and said that they were probing the whole incident. “The children were handed over to Child line and we have taken up the matter for investigation,” he said. According to statistics available with the Assam Government, around 9,500 children went missing from different places in Assam between 2007 and June 2014. Police and different NGOs, working for the children, have recovered only 3,840 children during the period.
A study by Unicef recently identified seven Assam districts —Sonitpur, Dhemaji, lakhimpur, Baksa, Kokrajhar, Udalguri and Kamrup as the most vulnerable districts for human trafficking.
Many children belonging to poor families in Assam and Manipur have been rescued in the past from Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. They were taken out of the State with the promise of good education and care. Many of them even faced physical, sexual and emotional harassment.