On June 1, two days after the girls at the Muzaffarpur shelter were moved out, one Ramesh Kumar, ‘secretary’ of the NGO run by Brajesh Thakur, wrote a letter to the SSP of Muzaffarpur, requesting that an FIR not be registered against the organisation as the allegations against it were “untrue”. Point No. 14 in Kumar’s letter says that a “judicial team” had been visiting the shelter every month and sending “pointers” to the High Court, but no one ever raised an objection. Point No. 15 states that there were “beeseeyon (scores of)” visits by members of the district Child Protection Unit (CPU), but no official had pointed out any discrepancies. READ | Muzaffarpur shelter home case: Abuse under his care The letter also mentions how there were visits by the State Women’s Commission as well. Again, no major concerns were raised, he pointed out. On July 30, The Indian Express had reported that Kumar was a “ghost” secretary whom no official of the Bihar social welfare department had ever “seen or met”. Yet, this ‘secretary’ raises a valid point. Over the four years of its existence, the shelter home in Bihar, like most government-run shelters in the state, was inspected by multiple bodies, but none flagged the “highly questionable manner” in which it was being run or that “several girls (had) reported about violence and being abused sexually”, as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) report said in April. “The District Inspection Committee, a seven-member body, is supposed to conduct a check on the shelters every three months. It is headed by the district magistrate and has the assistant director of the district child protection unit, a member of the child welfare committee, the chief medical officer, the district education officer, one officer of the special juvenile police unit and a member of the civil society on its board. Each of these bodies and members failed to detect what was happening at the shelter. In fact, on March 7 this year, the Committee presented a positive report on the shelter,” says an officer privy to the case. Another official, who does not wish to be identified and is involved in the investigation, refers to the failure of another government body — the 11-member Home Management Committee. “This body has to conduct a meeting every month to ensure that all shelters in the district are being run according to the guidelines of the Juvenile Justice Act. It is headed by the assistant director of the district child protection unit. Their meetings are also supposed to have representations from two children from the shelters. They must also address the problems put down by the children in the complaint box of the shelters. These norms were clearly not followed in the case of Brajesh Thakur’s NGO,” says the officer. Devesh Sharma, the Assistant Director of the District Child Protection Unit, however, blames Muzaffarpur’s Child Welfare Committee (CWC) for the failure. “I joined in August 2017, and the abuse in the shelter has been going on since 2013. CWC members have to make two visits to the shelter each month. Firstly, they did not have any women members on their board and none of them raised any concerns in the past four years. Now, one of their members has been arrested and another is on the run. It is they who need to answer,” says Sharma. After the shelter home case came to light, the Muzaffarpur CWC, a quasi-judicial body with a fixed three-year term, was dismantled. Said a source close to the State Women’s Commission, “The responsibility of this tragedy falls solely on the district CPU. They are supposed to be in direct touch with the children and they failed. Before the matter came to light, the Women’s Commission team had only had a brief meeting with the girls in November, and back then, they were not on an official inspection. The meeting was outside the shelter and the commission did not see the condition in which the girls were being kept. We have prepared a full report and helped the girls since they were moved out.”
