Chilling details of Deoria shelter home case highlight the police-political-criminal network
The blatant exploitation of young girls in a shelter home in Uttar Pradesh's Deoria district sent shock waves across the nation. But the fact of the matter is that such horror stories are not limited to this remote eastern district of the state. There is more than what meets the eye here as the sexual and physical abuse of young girls as well as child trafficking is understood to be going on unabated in several parts of the state.
And NGOs, like the one run by Girija Tripathi and her family in Deoria, are known to be thriving in several other places, under the obvious patronage of corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and policemen.
The report submitted to UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath by a two-member high-level committee, comprising Additional Chief Secretary-cum-Principal Secretary (Women and Child Welfare) Renuka Kumar and Additional Director General of Police Anju Gupta, is understood to contain heartrending stories of how such poor and helpless girls – mostly in their teens – were subjected to all kinds of physical, mental and sexual torture at the hands of those who are supposed to protect them.
Also, the laxity and apathy of the officials concerned have been highlighted in the report.
That Tripathi’s shelter home was also allegedly running a child trafficking racket has been exposed during her questioning by the high-level probe team. While the shelter home was being run from 2009, Tripathi’s NGO came into existence from 1993, with its units in certain other parts of impoverished eastern UP, where the poor and the deprived fall easy prey to services offered by such shady NGOs.
It is literally a "rags to riches" story for Girija Tripathi, who is now in her late fifties. She took off from running a tailoring centre about 25 years ago. This was elevated into a short stay protection home in 2003 and eventually grew into a full-fledged shelter home in 2009. The woman did everything to build her clout with influential local politicians and bureaucrats, who were, more often than not, very obliging. No wonder she did not take much time to acquire the profile of a leading “social worker” in Deoria, where she eventually started running three shelter homes as well as a child adoption centre.
That this shelter home was within a stone’s throw of the local police station says a lot about the "system" of turning a blind eye.
Had it not been for one conscientious cop, who promptly responded to the spoken complaint of an 11-year-old inmate who somehow managed to slip out of the house of horrors last week, the incident would never have come to light.
Well aware of Tripathi’s clout, the cop took the little girl straight to the Superintendent of Police, Rohan Kanay, who, in turn, did not waste any time in bringing everything into the public domain by holding a press conference. Any delay or lingering over the issue would have given the shelter home "madam" enough time to hush up the matter.
After the two officials Renuka Kumar and Anju Gupta, who were flown from Lucknow to Deoria to personally take stock of the situation on day one itself, spoke to the inmates, many startling revelations were made.
It is said that the helpless girls were not only thrashed and abused physically, but some of the older inmates were even forced to go and meet influential people in and around Deoria. Some of the girls were also reportedly carted by Girija Tripathi and her daughter to neighbouring cities, where they were abused by some influential persons.
The incident has exposed the blatant racket that was going on in the guise of an NGO — it also throws light on the callous attitude of the authorities at the district level. It is clearly evident from the official records that Renuka Kumar, widely perceived as a "no-nonsense" officer, was the first one to initiate action against Tripathi’s NGO, together with a whole lot of other such institutions across the state.
It was on the directions of the Allahabad High Court that she prepared a report that became an eye-opener about the financial irregularities in many NGOs, including Tripathi’s, running the shady shelter home in Deoria. Simultaneously, Kumar, who is widely credited with removing much muck from the notoriously corrupt department, discontinued all grants to the NGO in 2015. Eventually, in 2017, the NGO was blacklisted and its licence cancelled.
However, none of these actions made any impact on the NGO, or its powerful chief Girija Tripathi, for whom business went on as usual.
The local police continued to send young girls rescued from different places to the shelter home even after it was blacklisted.
"We could run our home with the finances that came from our adoption centre," she reportedly admitted before the probe team that finally put her in the dock. Preliminary investigations have revealed that the child-trafficking racket was operating in the guise of an adoption centre that extended well beyond the geographical boundaries of India.
An old-age home run by Tripathi's NGO in Gorakhpur was allegedly used as a den to entertain the high and mighty, for whom young girls were arranged from the Deoria shelter home.
The district probationary officer, responsible for keeping track of all such homes, was either blissfully unaware of the derecognition of this home, or was eating out of Girija Tripathi’s palm. He has now been placed under suspension.
The less said, the better about the attitude of the higher-ups in the district. "Since social welfare issues do not remain on the focus of the government, we also do not pay that kind of attention to them. After all, we have to first focus attention on issues that are top priority of the government," then-Deoria District Magistrate Sujit Kumar was heard confessing, shortly after being removed from the job. That is how he explained his inability to carry out the directives of the Child and Women Welfare Department to periodically inspect these shelter homes.
The ineffectiveness of the police was demonstrated in their failure to step into the shelter home even after an FIR was lodged against it.
A defiant Girija Tripathi and her family not only managed to thwart the entry of the police, but went to the extent of holding a press conference and declaring war against the authorities barely four days before the 11-year old girl managed to flee from the home and expose the racket on August 5.
UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath may have made it loud and clear that no one, howsoever high and mighty, would be allowed to go scot-free in this case. However, the menace is not limited to Deoria. Even as the Deoria scandal was unfolding, 26 girls were reported missing from two shelter homes in Pratapgarh on August 8. Two years ago, 57 girls were found missing from a shelter home in Agra. While 24 girls were rescued from the Deoria shelter home, the police have been trying to track down seven other missing girls.
Whether the saffron-clad CM actually means business and will succeed in bringing an end to the unpardonable menace is something only time will tell.