The Government Railway Police have not made much headway in the investigation into the suspected case of trafficking in of 589 children to the State.
The railway police had detained the children who arrived in two trains at the Palakkad Junction railway station on Saturday and Sunday.
Investigators have failed to get details from eight persons from Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, arrested on Monday under Section 370 (5) of the Indian Penal Code on the charge of trafficking in the children, below the age of 12.
As the children speak local dialects of Bengali and Bihari, efforts of the investigators to elicit basic information such as their native place have not yielded result.
Talking to The Hindu , railway police inspector M. Manu said the investigators had reasons to suspect that many of the children were from migrant families from Bangladesh.
“Some of the children told us that they were refugees from Bangladesh who live in near total starvation. Poverty may have driven their parents to sell the children to those who brought them here,” he said.
The railway police ruled out claims of the two orphanages in Kozhikode and Malappuram that the children were orphans and being taken to Kerala to ensure better education and other basic facilities.
Child labour angleThe police were also investigating the child labour angle and whether they were destined for schools facing division fall.
Fr. Jose Paul, chairman of District Child Welfare Committee, said the children, which included infants, did not have mandatory documents such as admission papers and certificates related to birth, age, income etc.
Though the arrested belonged to villages in Bhagalpur and Bankha districts in Bihar, Khodda district in Jharkhand, and Malda in West Bengal, the police believe the children may not be from these areas.
Meanwhile, 73 children from the first batch were handed over to the District Child Welfare Committee in Kozhikode on Sunday. The committee was earlier entrusted with the task of safekeeping 156 children from the first batch.
All the children from the second batch were handed over to the child welfare committee in Malappuram.
The rest were at two shelters at Pezhumkara and Malampuzha.
