Rita, who works as a domestic help in houses and hotels in Bengaluru, returned home on the evening of August 6 to find her two daughters Sanjana and Chaitrika had not come back from the park.
The mother of four, who struggles to make ends meet to pay a monthly house rent of Rs 2,000, rushed to the Child Welfare Committee where she was reportedly informed that both had been picked up under “Operation Smile”, an initiative carried out by the city police in association with other departments of the government and NGOs.
A month after the Operation conducted across the city ‘rescued’ 250 children in an attempt to crack down on suspected trafficking racket and curb begging, two NGOs on Saturday released an interim report calling the operation a “misguided one”.
The NGOs say they looked into around 30 cases, with Rita’s being one of them, and have found that only two of them were genuine cases of begging.
During their interaction with children and their families, they claim they observed that not only was the entire process of picking up children arbitrary, but many also had to undergo harassment to get their children released.
Rather than doing the detailed investigation, it seemed more likely that children were picked up based on a profile of what children to be picked up should look like. From what we were able to see, it boils down to coming from a particular income demographic, coupled with certain class markers.
— NGO report
Also, all the children have now been released. And how come no cases have been registered yet.
— Nishita Khajane, Concerned for Working Children
Members of the NGOs told reporters that while they do not negate the existence of such rackets, authorities need to be more sensitive and rational in their approach.
Punching loopholes in the operation, Darshana from ALF said:
The fact that someone is poor is made criminal. This project was meant to help children, but it ended up hurting them. ‘Operation Smile’ is a failure because no one seems to be smiling at the end of it.
—Darshana, ALF
The next step the NGO plans is to file an RTI and submit the report to the government, including the stakeholders in the operation. The final report on Operation Smile is likely to be released in a month’s time.
Speaking to The News Minute, P Harishekaran, Additional Commissioner of Police (East) had earlier said that of the 250 children rescued, 200 had been given back to their biological parents.
He however was unavailable for a comment on the NGOs report.
(Monalisa Das works with The News Minute. The article has been edited for length. Read the full article here.)
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