The High Court of Karnataka has directed the State government to take immediate action against childcare centres operating in the city without registration following a disclosure that there were at least 56 such illegal centres, including one operated by an official of the Department of Public Instruction (DPI).
The court also directed the government to take a decision on setting up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe instances of child trafficking disclosed in the report on a survey, carried out on the court’s direction, of minor children engaged in begging and hawking on city streets.
A Division Bench comprising Chief Justice Abhay Shreeniwas Oka and Justice Suraj Govindaraj issued the directions acting on reports submitted by the Karnataka State Legal Services Authority (KSLSA), which had identified 720 minors engaged in begging and hawking in several parts of the city. The KSLSA had also stated that 27 of these children were likely to be under the control of a mafia.The court had ordered the survey based on a PIL petition by the city-based Letzkit Foundation.
To M.P. and not back
When the KSLSA started mapping out street children, one Nagarathna, the then BEO of Vijayanagar, who was subsequently posted in the midday meal section of Zilla Panchayat, Bengaluru, brought to its notice that four children, staying at the childcare centre run by her in the name of Sarayu Charitable Trust, had gone to Madhya Pradesh along with their parents but did not come back.
The KSLSA communicated the information to the Madhya Pradesh Legal Services Authority, which traced the children to a village and found that some of them were sexually abused by the caretakers at the centre run by Ms. Nagarathna. An FIR was registered in M.P. and it was later transferred to Bengaluru.
This resulted in the KSLSA inspecting the Sarayu Charitable Trust, to find that it had been operating on the premises of the government school at Hosahalli, 9th Main Road, Vijayanagar, for the past eight years and 33 minor children (19 boys and 14 girls), engaged in begging and hawking in the Vijayanagar area, were housed in the childcare centre without any maintenance of register and without the centre being registered under Section 41 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2015. The report also listed 56 other such unregistered childcare centres in the city.
KSLSA member-secretary H. Shashidhara Shetty also informed the court in the report that initially, the jurisdictional police did not take proper steps and were about to give a clean chit to those involved in operating the childcare centre. The KSLSA report stated that a through probe was needed as many of these 33 children appeared to be part of human trafficking from M.P.
