Toddler found alone in Sheopur leads police to suspected child trafficking racket

Officers produced her before the local Child Welfare Committee, which placed her in a One Stop Centre, a government-run facility for vulnerable children. In the meantime, local residents launched a social media campaign, circulating photographs of the girl in the hope that someone might recognise her.

It was that campaign which broke the case open.

A woman came across the photographs on social media. She immediately contacted the police in Sheopur and told them that said she recognised the child, as she spent three months as her caretaker.

She told investigators that the child had been brought home by a Bhopal-based couple when the girl was approximately three months old. She said she was hired to look after the child at a salary of Rs 20,000 a month. She was never told where the child had come from.

“They never disclosed the child’s background,” she told police, according to investigators who relayed her account. She alleged that the couple subjected the girl to physical abuse, and that she herself had “repeatedly pleaded with the couple on the child’s behalf.” The girl, she said, had “become deeply attached to her” After three months without receiving any salary, the woman quit.

She also told police that “roughly a month before the highway incident,” the couple “proposed that she take the child permanently, promising to complete legal formalities”, but she refused.

After identifying the child in the social media photographs, she did not wait. She contacted the police and personally escorted officers to the couple’s residence in Bhopal.

Police took the couple into custody at their Bhopal home and transported them to Sheopur for questioning. Initially, the couple maintained that they had legally adopted the child. That account did not hold.

During interrogation, the couple allegedly admitted that the child had not been adopted through any legal process but was purchased.

The accused told investigators they paid approximately Rs 1 lakh for the girl through an illegal network operating out of Indore. The transaction, they said, had been facilitated by a woman who ran a beauty parlour in the city. When the exchange took place, the child was six days old, police said.

The couple told police they wanted a daughter and turned to this network rather than navigate the formal adoption process, police said. A family member of the accused man said, “The family didn’t even know when or how he had taken the child,” he said. “If he had spoken to us, we could have found some solution. But he never made contact.”

The family’s financial circumstances had been deteriorating. The accused husband used to run petrol pumps but had to shut operations after financial losses. Investigators say the couple came to believe the child was the source of their misfortune.

According to police accounts and statements made during questioning, domestic conflict began soon after the girl arrived in the household. “The woman was uncomfortable with the child and, police say, treated her harshly. As financial losses mounted, the couple became convinced the girl had brought bad luck into their home and business,” said a senior police officer.

On April 18, the couple drove approximately 400 kilometres from Bhopal to Sheopur, the route passing through a religious site the couple visited along the way. Near Soinkalan, they spotted a settlement beside the highway. They left the child there and drove back.

An FIR was registered against them for abandoning a minor in unsafe conditions. After their confessions, police invoked additional sections under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita related to child trafficking, as well as provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act.

Sheopur Superintendent of Police Sudhir Agrawal, who is overseeing the investigation, said the case transformed rapidly once the couple disclosed how they had obtained the child.

“The investigation gathered momentum through technical evidence and social media inputs, which helped police trace the individuals linked to the child,” Agrawal said. “During questioning, the couple who had abandoned the child admitted to having procured her illegally in Indore by paying Rs 1 lakh.”

Acting on that disclosure, Agrawal constituted three separate investigation teams and dispatched them to Indore. The teams were led by the district headquarters DSP, the nodal officer of the human trafficking unit, and the officer-in-charge of the women’s police station.

In Indore, police arrested six people, including the beauty parlour operator who allegedly brokered the transaction, along with three other women and one man. Investigators believe the network sourced children from economically vulnerable families and sold them to buyers under the guise of adoption.

All the accused were produced before a court and taken on a three-day police remand. “During the remand, we expect more disclosures that could reveal the wider network behind such illegal activities,” Agrawal said.

The girl’s biological parents have not yet been identified.

Police believe she was sold through the trafficking network within days of her birth. Investigators are working to determine under what circumstances her biological parents gave her up, whether through coercion, financial desperation, or other means and if the same network has conducted similar transactions involving other children.

“We are verifying all leads, and further action will be taken based on evidence that emerges during the investigation,” Agrawal said. “The case is being treated as a serious instance of child trafficking and illegal adoption.”