Until she was found on Friday, Pooja Gaud was Girl Number 166 in the missing girls’ file at Mumbai’s Dadabhai Naoroji Nagar police station.
Nearly 10 years ago, on January 22, 2013, she had disappeared while on her way to school. Just seven-years-old then, she had squabbled with her elder brother over the sharing of a Rs 10 note. While he ran into the school building, she stayed outside, sulking. That was the last time he saw her.
The story made headlines when assistant sub inspector Rajendra Bhosale, who had just retired, told Indian Express’s Smitha Nair in 2015 that of the 166 missing children in his file, 165 had been reunited with their families.
Pooja Gaud, the daughter of a peanut seller, was the sole exception. He had put up posters, interviewed scores of people, gone back again and again to the spot where she had last been seen and would carry her photograph in his wallet, just in case.
Lost—and found
When Pooja was rescued on Friday, she was living just 500 metres from her home in a slum at Juhu Galli, Andheri.
On that winter morning in 2013, she had been lured away with the promise of an ice cream and chocolate, allegedly, by Harry D’souza. According to the police report, Harry and his wife Soni, had no children then, and first took Pooja to Goa, then placed her in a hostel in Raichur, Karnataka for a year and finally brought her back to Mumbai in 2015.
Once Soni had her own baby, life became difficult for Pooja. She would be slapped often and was soon put to work in other people’s homes. In fact, it was a co-worker to whom she confessed that the D’Souzas were not her real parents. Harry had told her that he had taken her from her mother.
The co-worker verified the story on her smart-phone where she came across the old posters. None of the numbers listed worked. But one did. It belonged to Mohammad Rafique Sheikh, a neighbour of the Gaud family at Juhu Galli.
When Sheikh’s phone rang on Thursday, he thought it was a hoax. But when he took it across to Pooja’s mother – her father died last year—the reunification of the family became just a matter of time.
Police have arrested the D’souzas on a variety of charges including abduction and kidnapping.
India’s crisis of missing children
Despite a four-month nationwide lockdown, over 162 children went missing every single day in 2020 – a total of 59,262, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. When you add to that the 48,972 children who remained untraced from the previous year, the number of missing children in India in 2020 stood at 108,234.
Nearly half of those who go missing remain untraced. In 2020, 45% of the missing children reported had not been found.
Amongst missing children, the number of girls are disproportionately high – 77% in 2020 were girls.
“Adolescent girls are the most vulnerable,” said Reena Banerjee, founder-secretary of a Delhi-based NGO, Navsrishti that runs a missing children campaign. “They are easily lured and in many cases even after they are found, their parents don’t want them back because of stigma.”
There are several reasons why a child could go missing, from running away from home to trafficking.
In June 2021, I wrote about how the coronavirus pandemic had triggered a child rights’ emergency. Activists and non-profits like the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) working on the ground were reporting a massive spike in trafficking.
To get an idea of the scale, in the 40 years since it was founded, BBA had rescued an average of 2,500 children every year from trafficking.
But in just over 16 months from January 2020, BBA rescued four times as many, 10,417 children, with 4,334 from just one state, Telangana and another 3,110 from Uttar Pradesh.
“It’s a combination of poverty, kids being out of school and rising unemployment,” Rakesh Senger, executive director, Kailash Satyarthi Foundation said. “We are getting reports of kids being trafficked from regions like Jehanabad and Bokaro where missing children and trafficking had earlier been virtually unknown.”
Silver Linings
There are happy endings said Soha Moitra, regional director CRY. But these are few and far between.
Finding a missing child depends on the perseverance of the parents, the police and civil society, she said.
But challenges and difficulties remain even after a child is rescued. “Even after returning to their families it becomes really difficult for them to normalise their lives because of the trauma and abuse they have undergone.”
In addition to the physical trauma, are mental health issues like depression and anxiety. “They must be provided with proper medical care and counselling to save them from a life of low self-esteem,” Moitra added.
But for now, for one family, the joy of being reunited with a daughter is perhaps enough.
IN NUMBERS
The cost of having a baby in a hospital or health facility went gone up 26.5% from an average of Rs 7,935 in 2016 to Rs 10,035 in 2020. The average expenditure included hospital stay, tests, medicines and transportation. In a public health facility the average cost was Rs 3,245. In private facilities it was eight times more at Rs 24,663.
National Family Health Survey data analysed by Akshi Chawla, associate editor, Centre for Economic Data and Analysis.
WATCH
Watch here.
Credit: Only One United Channel
Chloe Kelly celebrated her winning goal for the English Lionesses against Germany in the Euro 2022 Final by taking her shirt off, swinging it around her head in joy and running on the field in her sports bra in what is being seen as an iconic celebration of an iconic goal. “This is a woman’s body – not for sex or show – just for the sheer joy of what she can do and the power and skill she has,” tweeted author Lucy Ward
BOOKSHELF
Nilanjana Bhowmick’s Lies Our Mothers Told Us: The Indian Women’s Burden (Aleph, Rs 699) is a new addition to the growing library on the stickiness of gendered attitudes and inequality that continue to dog Indian women. Marrying data with anecdotal reporting, Bhowmick who has over 21 years of experience as a journalist asks why women continue to live lives that are hard and unequal, 75 years after Independence.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED
What does marital status have to do with abortion rights?
Picking up from where they left off after granting permission to an unmarried women to have an abortion at 24 weeks, the two-judge Supreme Court bench of DY Chandrachud and JB Pardiwala said any discrimination between married and unmarried women with respect to their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy must be removed. The judges were referring to guidelines in India’s abortion law that do not allow single women to seek a termination after 20 weeks while divorcees and widows can have an abortion up to 24 weeks.
‘Sarpanch patis’ take oath
Nearly three decades after a constitutional amendment earmarked 33% of seats in panchayats for women, Madhya Pradesh’s Gaisabad panchayat in Damoh district seemed to have missed the memo when the husbands of the newly-elected women panchayat member, including the woman sarpanch, took the oath of office in their place.
The phenomenon of sarpanch patis – husbands who put up their wives as proxies and continue to wield power after they are elected –is not new. In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called it a roadblock to women’s empowerment.
Repeat offender
Out on bail following his arrest in a 2020 rape case, a man allegedly raped the same woman at knife point in Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur district. According to the police, the man threatened the woman to withdraw her previous rape complaint.
FIELD NOTES : Failing the Bechdel test
Women get just 25% of talk time in movie trailers. Female representation in senior management in the film business is just 10%. And only 10% departments are headed by women with cinematography having the lowest female head of department representation and production design the highest.
Findings from the O Womaniya! 2022 report spearheaded by Ormax Media and Film Companion and supported by Amazon Prime have revealed an abysmal state of gender representation on and off screen.
The report looked at 150 films released in 2021 in eight different languages. These included streaming releases and series that had five times more women-headed departments than theatrical films and gave greater talk time to female characters in trailers.
Having a woman head of department and more women in decision-making roles led to the hiring of more women. In fact, when a film or series was commissioned by a woman, the number of women hired to lead departments doubled, the report found.
Read the report here.
AROUND THE WORLD
In Kansas, over half a million people emphatically rejected a referendum that would have removed abortion protections from the state constitution. The landslide win, said CNN, was stunning given that Donald Trump had won in the red state by 15 points in 2020.
In South Africa, the gang-rape of eight women by gunmen near Johannesburg has led to a national debate on chemical castration for rapists. The gang attacked the cast and crew while they were setting up a shoot for a music video. Over 80 people have been arrested so far, reports Al Jazeera.
In Kenya, reports Reuters, dozens of women candidates have been physically assaulted while campaigning for the presidential, legislative and local elections on August 9. There are only 75 women in the 349-member lower house and women make up about a third of the upper house.
That’s it for this week. If you have a tip or information on gender-related developments that you would like to share write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com.
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| That’s it for this week. If you have a tip or information on gender-related developments that you would like to share write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com. |