A 12-year-old boy from Kerala, who fathered a child with a 16-year-old is perhaps the youngest Indian father.
The young mother gave birth to a baby girl a few months ago at a hospital in Ernakulam.
The personal details, including the identity of the young parents and the baby, are being withheld in accordance with the provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
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Investigators confirmed the paternity of the child this week after carrying out the genetic profiling of both the baby and the father.
‘Precocious puberty’
Dr. P.K. Jabbar, Professor and Head of the Endocrinology Department of the Medical College Hospital, Thiruvananthapuram, said the boy could have a medical condition called “precocious puberty,” in which a child attains puberty at a much earlier age.
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It was not an unusual medical condition but no incident of a boy becoming a father at the age of 12 had come to his notice, Dr. Jabbar said.
The DNA profiles generated from the blood samples of the father and the baby, who was just 18 days old at the time of the scientific analysis, were compared to affirm the paternity.
In the “absence of identical twins, it was found that the alleged father was the biological father of the child” whose blood samples were examined, sources said.
Police earlier registered a case against the boy under the POCSO Act. The case had opened up a legal conundrum as both the victim and the perpetrator were minors.