Funded by public, hidden from public: Maharashtra’s lost children

The Finance Minister might well begin his delivery mechanism investigations in Maharashtra’s children’s homes.

He won’t find an explosive multi-crore scam: just 40,000-odd young lives, hidden from public gaze behind institutional walls, silently wasting away.

Why Maharashtra? Because this state’s child-care sector consumes nearly half of the Rs 16.39 crore all-India grant—with state pitching in an equal amount—set aside for the purpose but does little to justify that.

Consider these:

• In Latur, constituency of CM Vilasrao Deshmukh, the government passes off an industrial godown—given grants of Rs 40 lakh over the past two years—as a children’s home

• A multi-home campus run by the health minister showcases why Maharashtra’s booming children’s home industry is becoming the perfect tool to siphon off public taxes

• Illiterate and penurious parents, desperate for a better future for their children, are taken on an exploitative ride by a corrupt official-NGO nexus

• In Maharashtra’s rural depths, archaic and barbaric atrocities are inflicted everyday on children

So while, on the one hand, official policy declares institutionalising a child as ‘‘the last resort’’, on the other, a (partial) list of 148 institutions given by the Woman and Child Welfare Department to this paper shows over 70 of these have been sanctioned in the last five years—and gifted lakhs of rupees in annual grants.

Professionals in the sector from across the state believe that there are more than 500 children’s homes across Maharashtra today, the affairs within their walls mocking the well-intended Juvenile Justice Act.

Probably, no case exposes this shame better that that of Dilip (no one seems to know his last name) at the Government Boys Home in Latur. On paper, it’s been nine months since the dull-eyed 8-year-old orphan—still traumatised by his parents’ death—was entrusted to R Kagne, superintendent.

‘‘In bachchon ka sab kuchh main hi hoon (I am everything to these children),’’ Kagne brags.

Behind him, a board listing past superintendents shows as many as 13 officials between 1998 and 2001—at which point the list simply gives up. Outside Kagne’s office, the sole entry to the stark ‘‘home’’ is a rattling iron shutter, indication of the fetid hall’s previous avataar: a godown for poha (puffed rice) sacks, its current occupants accorded no greater value. Inside, children are silently arrayed before the TV, as rats scurry around the floor. The decrepit infrastructure is mirrored in a derelict staff.

There are 103 boys here, but the home doesn’t have even a child welfare officer: hanging around is V Shelke, entrusted by Kagne to write the monthly progress reports for every troubled inmate.

His qualification? An agricultural degree. In June, the unemployed Shelke successfully exploited proximity to the government’s District Woman & Child Welfare Officer to land the job.

Ask Shelke a rudimentary question about Dilip’s surviving family and he mumbles: ‘‘He doesn’t have anyone.’’

‘‘Yes, I do,’’ whimpers Dilip, ‘‘my little sister Ravina is back in Bombay. I haven’t seen her since last year…’’

In the Government Observation Home, Beed (home town of Health Minister Vimal Mundala), in violation of all child-right norms, two incarcerated boys—an 8-year old charged with stealing a bull and a 16 year-old guilty of violence—stare out of the depths of their pitch-dark cell. They are even denied permission to go out for ablutions.

B Jogdanda, the Superintendent of the cramped institution justifies this on the grounds that they must not escape. Mention the Juvenile Justice (JJ) Act—its elaborate provisions govern the working of these institutions—which speaks of treating children with ‘‘dignity’’ and she stares at you blankly.

She is only aware of the ‘‘Bombay Children’s Act’’, an 80 year-old British law, which the JJ Act replaced back in 1986.

In Paithan, The Indian Express accompanies an investigating team for a central government survey when they visit the Government Home for Girls. For two decades, the supplies for the home are in the hands of a single contractor.

A walk-through the storeroom and a study of the logbook and the surveyors detect petty but systematic corruption in the home, entrusted with delivering taxes of over Rs 21 lakh annually to its child inmates.

But Superintendent H R Shinde—holding additional charge on top of his other job in the courts as probation officer—is ignorant of all norms.

Later as the surveyors converse with minor girls of the institution in a closed-door session, the children praise everything about the home, but fearfully reveal later that staff have threatened them to do so.

Meanwhile, back in his office, shaking his head to surveyors’ questions, Shinde shrugs. ‘‘Dekho,’’ he says with a yawn. ‘‘Mein itna deep mein jaata nahin hoon.’’ (See, I don’t go into the problems so deeply).