Karnataka begging racket: Uvulas chopped off to mute kids

KALABURAGI: The begging racket busted involving children below 10 years of age who were forced to starve and collect alms in the city is turning even murkier.

Women and Child Welfare Department’s District Child Protection Officer Chikka Venkataramanappa told reporters on Friday that doctors who attended two of the malnourished children, have found that their uvulas were chopped off and they were not able to talk. The children — Farjan (9) and Paijan (8) — are being treated at the District Government Hospital for severe malnourishment.

Venkataramanappa suspect that the four ringleaders (three from Sambhai of Uttar Pradesh and one from Kalaburagi) chopped off the uvuals of Farjan and Paijan so that they would attract sympathy of people and not be able to reveal the truth.

As they are facing it hard to drinking water and consume food, it has been planned to provide treatment to these children from expert doctors, said District Child Welfare Committee member Sudha Paala.
Recently, various organisations, including Child Protection Unit of the Women and Child Welfare Department, District Child Welfare Committee, Samskar Pratisthana and Don Bosco Child Helpline busted a racket involving two women and a man from Uttar Pradesh and a person from Kalaburagi using children for begging in the month of Ramzan by making the children starve so that they could elicit more sympathy from the public, especially from Muslims who donate a part of their earnings to the poor during Ramzan.

Two boys — Farid (20) and Jishan (13) — used to carry Farjan and Piajan in a wheelchair begging for alms. The activists caught hold of Rubi and Rahisa Begum, another person from Uttar Pradesh and Basheer Alam, who is an employee of a local newspaper. They had handed them over to the Raghavendra Nagar Police station last Monday.