Thiruvananthapuram: “They were weak, their faces damp with tears, very hungry and desperate to see their mothers.” This was how a woman member of the State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights described the 213 other-state boys and girls, all of them below 12 years old, who were detained in a make-shift place after their four-day long journey from Jharkhand.
More than 500 students were transported from North India to the state but these 200-odd children were the ones who did not have valid documents. The others were taken to various orphanages on the strength of documents produced.
“Now no one even seems to know where these children were to be taken,” the Commission member and lawyer J Sandhya said.
In fact, no one was really sure where they came from.
“They could have been from West Bengal, Bihar or Jharkhand, even Orissa. Many spoke a strange Hindi dialect," she said.
Sandhya said it was the plight of the children that disturbed her the most. “Almost all of them were crying; a weak kind of moan that will shatter your soul. They wanted to go home, to be with their mothers. Looking into their eyes was painful. They looked so insecure,” she said. It seemed as if they had no idea where they were being taken to.
It was hard to assess their social and economic background (as there were no identification papers) but they looked poorly fed and clothed. Their emaciated look could also easily be the result of their arduous journey.
“431 of them were stuffed into three bogeys of a train, the younger ones heaped on the laps of the older ones. It looked as if they were not given enough food,” she said, adding that a few of the boys had high fever.
