Chennai lady waits for kidnapped son
Chennai: Nagarani is a resident of Chennai. Her two-year-old son Sathish was kidnapped seven years ago.
Last year, the police told Nagarani that Sathish had been adopted by a couple from the Netherlands and is now called Anbu.
Nagarani has gone to court, demanding that her son be brought back to her. "The police told me that the court has to take a decision. I don't care what the court decides, I've waited for seven years and I want to see my son," she says.
Stories of missing children are common in newspapers, but the police rarely links them to adoption rackets.
"There is no proper coordination between the different institutions, specially the police department and the agencies which are dealing with adoption. They are still not trained enough to connect child-trafficking and adoption rackets," says a Human Rights Law Network lawyer, D Githa.
The Chennai Poice told CNN-IBN that they found Sathish's adoption papers in the offices of Malaysian Social Services.
However, they have stopped short of accusing the Malaysian Social Service of kidnapping the child.
But in fact Malaysian Social Service had their foreign adoption licence revoked in 2001 and even now those running the agency face charges of child- trafficking.
"According to the police, the children were stolen in 1998. We didn't have any idea, but according to our files all the children were handed over either by mother or someone responsible," says says an official at the Malaysian Social Service, Vatsala Ravindranathan.
Since babies are now fetching lakhs of rupees from foreign parents, agencies are now resorting to kidnap as well.
"We are not opposed to adoption, but we are definitely opposed to stealing of children. We are opposed to trafficking," says author of study on adoption practices in Tamil Nadu, Sujata Mody.
Meanwhile, Nagarani waits for her child Sathish, who has now been rechristened Anbu and is living in another country with another family.
(With inputs from Parul Malik and Rohit Khanna in New Delhi)