Two people running an adoption centre in West Bengal which is suspected of selling at least 17 children to couples abroad have been arrested, police said on Tuesday.
The orphanage allegedly sold children as young as six months to families in Europe, America and Asia for between $12,000 and $23,000.
Police arrested the head of the orphanage and the deputy at the weekend after a tip-off from the federal adoption agency.
‘In the last two to three years, they have sold at least 17 children,’ a police officer told news agency AFP on condition of anonymity.
‘We will try to contact the couples and are expecting more arrests in coming days.’
One French couple paid 1.5 million rupees ($23,000) for a child in 2015, he said.
The accused were also involved in running two other homes in the area.
‘Two people were arrested after raids in three charitable homes on Saturday night,’ Sashi Panja, state women and child development minister, said.
It is unclear how the alleged sales escaped official notice.
Investigators said they had been monitoring the charity since June when child welfare authorities found discrepancies in their records and relocated all the children from one of the homes.
One said the accused ran health camps to identify poor and unmarried pregnant women and convinced them to give away their babies for adoption after paying them.
‘They used fake fitness certificates and police stamps to process the adoption applications,’ the officer said.
Police are also said to be investigating whether the adoption racket was part of a wider human trafficking operation.
‘What is shocking is that the head of the (orphanage) was also running a shelter for destitute women and selling their babies,’ Rashmi Sen of the West Bengal state women and child development ministry told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
‘Ongoing investigations will also probe if the women were trafficked to the home to keep the adoption racket going.’
‘There are at least 17 children who were housed in this home (in Jalpaiguri) who are untraceable,’ Subodh Bhattacharjee of the Jalpaiguri child welfare committee told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
‘They were giving children for adoption without our knowledge, violating laid down guidelines.’
‘Our own enquiry last year revealed that the children had not been entered into the government system, which mandates recording of every abandoned child,’ Sen said.
‘In January we moved 15 children from the orphanage to other homes for their safety. They were all below the age of five, some just a few months old.’
India has an estimated 30 million orphans, but the rules governing international adoptions are strict and domestic adoptions remain relatively rare.
Only 3,011 children were legally adopted by local couples in India between April 2015 and March 2016, down from 3,988 in the previous period, according to the Central Adoption Resource Authority.
Experts say desperate couples wanting to adopt in India are often frustrated by lengthy bureaucratic delays and complex rules, pushing them towards the thriving illegal adoption market.
In recent years the federal government has pledged to relax the adoption rules for local couples.
For foreigners and couples of Indian origin living abroad, the number of adoptions has risen by almost half but they remain subject to intense scrutiny, and the adoption process can take years.
The latest scandal comes four months after police arrested 18 people over the sale of newborn babies in the same state.
Thirteen babies were rescued and skeletons of two other infants found near the port city of Kolkata.
Those arrested include doctors, midwives and the owners of charities and clinics and they are suspected of taking babies from women immediately after they had given birth and telling them their children were stillborn.
They were then smuggled out in biscuit boxes and kept at adoption centres before being sold. The scale of the operation is still being uncovered.
Reports of human trafficking in India increased 25 per cent in 2015 compared to the year before, with more than 40 per cent of cases involving children, according to government crime data.
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