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Journalism of Courage
MUMBAI, April 5: Sandeep Waghmare plays cheerfully with the other kids in the Thane Civil Hospital’s children’s ward, his amputated right arm posing no handicap in the gentle frolicking.
But behind the smiling face lurks a hideous tale of torture, the wages of daring to ask his employer for the pittance due after five months of toiling in a Bhiwandi scrap shop.
On February 6, the enraged employer threw the 13-year-old on an electrical transformer, leaving him with an injured arm infected with gangrene. Today, Sandeep’s mother Ranjana, who has lodged a complaint with the Bhiwandi police, is dizzy from running around in search of justice.
When Sandeep, son of a truck driver from Bhiwandi, was employed by Pradeep Bhangarwalla Parvesh, he had no inkling that Scrooge could be so merciless. Yet to find his feet, the boy told Express Newsline from his hospital bed: “I was working as a dish-washer in a hotel before I took the job at the scrap shop. I was happy as I was promised Rs 100 more than the Rs 500 Iearned at the hotel.
“Five months passed but my new employer didn’t give me a single rupee. Whenever I asked for it, he would abuse me in filthiest language,” the boy recalls.
“One day, my mother advised me to collect all my dues and quit the job as she wanted me to take up another one at Ahmednagar. She also told me not to take a no for an answer. So, I marched off with determination and courage,” he says.
“But my determination only infuriated the man, who pushed me around and beat me up. I was still insistent, which is when he took me outside the shop and shoved me on a live electrical transformer. “The electric shock made me unconscious and the next thing I knew, I was in hospital with a burnt right hand,” Sandeep recounts.
A dazed but determined Ranjana told Express Newsline at the Thane district court: “Sandeep was missing for about a month and we hadn’t a clue to what had happened. `’Two women, who had rushed Sandeep to hospital, had cited a false address for the hospital. “Ilearnt of my son’s whereabouts by sheer coincidence,” she says, explaining how the hand of Destiny guided her to her son’s hospital bed. One day, an autorickshaw driver told me that my husband had been admitted to the Thane Civil Hospital. When I arrived, I was dumbstruck to see my son staring up at me, his arm amputated.”
Doctors attending on the boy say Sandeep was in terrible shape. “Our efforts to heal the partially burnt hand failed. We had no alternative but to amputate his palm to make sure the gangrene would not spread to other parts of the body,” one of them says.
Still recovering from the shock and with little money for expenses, the Waghmares could now do with a hand from Providence.
