Poverty stricken Banjara tandas deep inside the thick forests in Konchavaram in Chincholi taluk of Gulbarga district are back in the news after about a decade for the same story but with a difference.
There are several instances of newborn girls, particularly in Banjara families that have more than one girl child, mysteriously disappearing. Tandas such as Vanti Chinti were in the news for many weeks a decade ago over large-scale sale of newborn girls to orphanages across the border in Andhra Pradesh. While newborn girls were being sold for Rs. 500 then, now many such infants are going missing.
According to reports reaching the district headquarters, midwives who performed deliveries in these tandas where the number of institutional delivery is very low due to the inaccessibility to hospitals, found to their shock during subsequent visits that the newborn girls were missing. Their mothers failed to give them a proper reply about the missing infants.
According to Anandraj, president of the District Child Welfare Committee, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working for development and protection of children, discreet enquiries by midwives in the tandas revealed that mothers themselves were allegedly denying the newborns milk and medicines, leading to their death.
Visit
Mr. Anandraj said when a team of officials from the Women and Child Development Department, led by Deputy Director Ratna Kalamdani, visited some of these tandas last week, young mothers volunteered to give away their newborn girls to the officials. They said it was not be possible for them to raise the girl child and face the difficulties in getting her married by giving hefty dowry. After the government tightened the screws on orphanages and maintained a close vigil on such tandas to check trafficking of newborn girls, poverty stricken families appear to have chosen other ways to do away with the infants.
Chincholi Assembly constituency is represented by Minister for Infrastructure Development Sunil Valyapure.
