Assam Police has rescued 10 individuals -- eight minors and two adults -- from child traffickers from the Upper Subansiri district of neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh. Two middlemen -- Deep Jyoti Gogoi (26), who hails from Assam's North Lakhimpur district, and Dipak Karmakar (30), a resident of Tinsukia -- have been arrested.
Based on a complaint lodged by a neighbour of one of the missing children, Doomdooma police launched an operation with personnel of the Talap Police outpost to rescue the children. The police team rescued the children on Tuesday and arrested two middlemen.
On being interrogated, the duo reportedly revealed that all the 10 individuals were handed over to them by their parents in exchange for money.
Police said the children were from the tea garden areas in Assam and belonged to a poor family background. The middlemen allegedly convinced the parents of the children of a good job and money in Arunachal Pradesh.
After taking the children to Arunachal Pradesh, the middlemen sold them to a child trafficking gang. Tinsukia police has registered a case against the duo under Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code.
Police have launched a thorough investigation into the matter and are in touch with their Arunachal Pradesh counterpart to bust the child trafficking racket in the neighbouring state.
Speaking exclusively to ABP Live, Tinsukia Superintendent of Police Gaurav Abhijit Dilip said, "Both the middlemen approached the families of the children and lured them with an offer of providing good jobs and money and convinced them to send their children to Arunachal Pradesh."
"The duo then took the children to the Upper Subansiri district in Arunachal Pradesh and sold them to the child trafficking racket. The children were then sold to different wealthy families to work at their homes as domestic help," SP Gaurav said.
The SP said the children were kept at a child care home for sometime and after proper counseling, they were handed over to their respective families.
Between 2017 and 2022, 625 children were rescued by the state police, Government Railway Police (GRP) and Anti-Human Trafficking Unit of Crime Investigation Department (CID) of the state police force.
The Kamrup Metropolitan district in Assam, comprising Guwahati city, is most vulnerable to child trafficking. Between 2017 and 2022, 77 children were trafficked from Guwahati and 481 children from other parts of Assam.
Several NGOs are also working in tandem with the law-enforcement agencies to prevent child trafficking.
"The traffickers eye children between the age group of six and 18. Once taken out of the state, they are forced to work as domestic help. The child traffickers mostly concentrate on the tea garden and other backward areas, riverine areas and target poverty-stricken families. Many children are trafficked during the floods in Assam as they get displaced," Dushmanta Dutta, Administrative Officer, Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW), a NGO engaged in anti-child trafficking, told ABP Live.
"The child traffickers easily motivate their victims by luring them to provide good jobs in the metros, especially Delhi and Mumbai. Once they leave the state, it becomes difficult for them to return against the wishes of the traffickers. We rescue a trafficked child with the help of the police when the case is reported to us but unfortunately, the majority of the cases remain unreported. There is no data on how many children have been actually trafficked outside the state," Dutta lamented.
The Assam government has taken various steps to curb the growing menace of child trafficking in the state. The government has been filing cases under The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, and The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, to investigate the trafficking cases.
The state government has also formed an Anti-Human Trafficking Unit and Special Juvenile Police in all districts to prevent such crimes.