On January 28, three men were travelling in a white Maruti Ertiga with a woman in her 30s, who had a newborn baby in her lap, when officers in mufti intercepted them near the Kotarpur pumping station near the Ahmedabad airport. The stop unravelled an alleged child trafficking racket involving at least 10 children who were sold between Gujarat and Telangana over a span of two years.
The woman in question, Vandana Panchal, 34, a native of Ayodhya who had migrated to Ahmedabad, had “bought” a 15-day-old child from Himmatnagar in Gujarat’s Sabarkantha district and was out to sell it to a buyer identified as Nagraj in Hyderabad.
A resident of the Odhav area of Ahmedabad, Panchal was a familiar name in the Gujarat police dossier. In July last year, she was released by the Ahmedabad Rural Police after being questioned in a kidnapping case in Dholka. In March last year, she had been arrested from Ahmedabad by the Telangana Police in another child trafficking racket.
The other accused arrested by the Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) of Ahmedabad City police in the latest case were identified as Roshan alias Sajjan Mahavirprasad Agrawal, 42, of Hyderabad, Telangana (originally from Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan); Sumit Bachchan Yadav, 27, a resident of Vatva, Ahmedabad (originally from Sultanpur, UP). A fourth person, Maulik Umiyashankar Dave, 32, the driver of the vehicle, was detained and remains under investigation.
During questioning, the accused allegedly confessed to Crime Branch officers that they bought the 15-day-old child from “a person named Munnu near Himmatnagar for Rs 3,60,000” and were going to sell it to Nagraj, who was described as an “agent” in the racket.
A complaint was registered against the accused, sellers and buyers (Munnu alias Yunus and Nagraj), under sections pertaining to child trafficking under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) as well as under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act.
In 2024 and 2025, Panchal was arrested for allegedly trafficking three infants in a major case by Hyderabad police, and was suspected of being involved in the trafficking of four other children by the Ahmedabad Rural police.
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Suspected to be involved in a racket related to “egg donor” Manisha Solanki, who is an accused in a child kidnapping and trafficking case in Rural Ahmedabad’s Dholka from July 2025, Panchal is being investigated as a suspect in the kidnapping of four children there, besides being a co-accused in the trafficking case of three children from Gujarat who were taken to Hyderabad, and now the newborn. The Telangana case involves the alleged sale of 16 children from six states to childless couples.
Telangana Police probe: across 6 states
On February 25, 2025, Vandana Jigar Ashok Panchal was booked in an FIR lodged at Chaitanyapuri police station in Hyderabad, under BNS sections 143(5) (human trafficking) as well as under sections 80, 81 and 87 of the Juvenile Justice Act for the illegal adoption and sale of children and abetment of such an offence.
During the course of the investigation, the Chaitanyapuri police rescued 16 children, ranging from a few days old to a few months old, hailing from states including Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and Telangana.
Vandana Panchal was among 45 accused named in the FIR, including 14 people who were allegedly part of the main trafficking syndicate and 31 illegal adoptive parents (buyers) who had allegedly purchased children from this syndicate, said the Telangana Police.
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The Investigation Officer (IO) of the case, Police Sub-Inspector (PSI) P Bhadraiah of Chaitanyapuri police station, told The Indian Express, “We arrested Vandana Jigar Panchal on March 22, 2025, from Ahmedabad, Gujarat. We received 24 hours’ remand of the accused, wherein it was established that she was involved in trafficking three children from Gujarat to Telangana. She was then sent to judicial custody to Chanchalguda Central Jail in Hyderabad.”
Panchal applied for bail before the Telangana High Court on April 21, 2025, and on May 2, 2025, the high court denied her plea. However, she subsequently got bail, said the police. Notably, several other co-accused in the case received conditional bail and have to continuously report to the police station.
When asked if the chargesheet had been filed, PSI Bhadraiah further said, “We have not yet filed the chargesheet as the case is under investigation as 11 known accused and other unknown accused persons from other states continue to be on the run and absconding from the police.”
Panchal had remained in jail for about three months before getting bail and reaching Gujarat. A few days later, she would be picked up as a suspect by the Ahmedabad Rural police in the kidnapping of a seven-month-old child of a balloon seller in Dholka town.
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A balloon-seller’s baby who was almost ‘sold’
On July 30, 2025, the Police Station Officer (PSO) of Dholka Town station in Rural Ahmedabad received a call from a woman crying over the phone about her seven-month-old infant being “kidnapped”. The bereft mother, a homeless balloon seller from Tonk in Rajasthan, had left her baby in a makeshift cradle on the side of the road near their tent and had gone for her morning ablutions, but returned to find her child missing.
Using CCTV footage and other clues, the police traced a mobile phone number in the area to Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Aurangabad) in Maharashtra. The child and several accused persons were found at the bus stand there. They were booked for child trafficking and the child was returned to her mother.
The main accused in the case was Manisha Solanki, who police officers said was working in a private company in Dholka since 2021, but got involved in donating eggs for In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) after realising she could make much more money doing so. She got paid about Rs 25,000 to Rs 30,000 for her own donation and a commission of Rs 4,000 if she convinced another woman to do the same. She had met Panchal during this period.
“Having frequented IVF centres for a couple of years, the women realised that there is a huge demand for children among childless couples. In this particular case, they saw the homeless girl as an easy target and planned to kidnap her. However, this girl was not their first victim,” Om Prakash Jat, Superintendent of Police (SP), Ahmedabad Rural, told The Indian Express.
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Solanki allegedly confessed to the police that she had already sold four children – three in Hyderabad and one in Mumbai – earning Rs 3.5 to 4 lakh per child.
This led the Ahmedabad Rural police down the rabbit hole of the racket that spanned the alleged sale of at least 10 children over 2024 and 2025 at the rate of Rs 3.5 lakh for a boy and Rs 1.5 lakh for a girl. The accused would allegedly purchase the children from poor parents or single mothers for Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakh.
Panchal reappeared on the police radar after Solanki allegedly named her as the contact in the child trafficking business, said SP Jat. However, since the police did not find any direct links to tie Panchal to that specific case in Dholka, she was released, but not before expanding the investigation into the 10 children allegedly trafficked from Gujarat to Telangana.
“Information from the Telangana Police showed that she had been booked for trafficking three other children to Hyderabad in the February 2025 case, and our investigation made her a suspect in four more cases of the 10 currently under our investigation,” said SP Jat.
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Among the 10 cases under investigation, the ages of the infants allegedly trafficked ranged from four days to 2 years.
Joint probe to look into common links
SP Jat and Ajit Rajian, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Crime, of the Ahmedabad City police, confirmed to The Indian Express on Friday that they would now conduct a joint investigation into the larger child trafficking racket operating from the state and would look into all relevant cases where the children had either been kidnapped or stolen to be sold to childless couples in other states.
DCP Rajian said, “There are common links between this current case under investigation, that of the 15-day-old infant, and other cases, including one by our Crime Branch itself back in 2023 and the investigation by the Ahmedabad Rural Police in 2025.”
He added, “While Munnu alias Yunus of Himmatnagar (Sabarkantha) was involved in the 2023 case and this current case, Roshan Agarwal is the common link between the 2025 rural case and this current 2026 one, and Vandana Panchal was in touch with him, thus becoming a suspect. There are multiple sets of people involved in the trafficking of different children. And so we have invited the rural police to officially join the investigation.”
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According to DCP Rajian, Panchal and the other accused had allegedly confessed to trafficking at least eight children, but some of them could overlap with the list prepared by the Ahmedabad Rural police.
With the joint investigation underway, now more children who were illegally ‘sold’ and transported across state lines are likely to be rescued and placed under the care of the state before being put up for legal adoption.
