A trade of breathtaking cynicism has been exposed in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, in which the babies of Indian tribal women have been bought and sold like loaves of bread.
Desperate couples in the West are paying thousands of pounds to adopt Indian babies that have been sold to crooked orphanages by middlemen. These middlemen have bought them from tribeswomen in the impoverished countryside.
The scandal first emerged two years ago in Hyderabad known as India's cyber city with its booming IT industry when two orphanages were raided and their respective directors arrested. But hopes that the trade had been stopped were dashed this week, when 100 babies were rescued by police and taken into government care.
Despite having his licence cancelled after his arrest two years ago, the director of Action for Social Development, N Sanjeeva Rao, was soon back in business. This week he was arrested again, and another orphanage, the John Abraham Memorial Bethany Home in Tandur, was raided and closed down.
For childless couples eager to adopt, India would seem to be an obvious place to look. The legal procedures, overseen since 1984 by the Central Adoption Resource Agency and with various other bodies such as the Indian Council for Child Welfare also checking and scrutinising are cumbersome and can be long drawn-out. Foreigners with no Indian blood are at the end of a long, slow queue. Though the wait for a child can be gruelling, at least prospective parents can feel confident that the process is properly regulated. Or can they?
Hyderabad's recurrent scandals suggest otherwise. In one of the orphanages raided two years ago, the Good Samaritan Evangelical Social Welfare Association, located in an expensive suburb of Hyderabad, 56 babies were found in the care of half-a-dozen scared and anxious nurses. Most of the babies were tiny, between three and six months old; all but four were girls. And most if not all of them had been purchased from women of the Lambada community, animistic tribespeople living in poverty-stricken hamlets in the arid and rocky Deccan plateau outside Hyderabad.
The traffickers, who keep homes like John Abraham and Good Samaritan stocked with infants, disappeared from view after the raids and arrests of April 1999. But by February 2000 they were back to their old tricks. A year ago villagers in the hamlet of Nakkalagandi reported that a couple called Hemli (the mother) and Ramulu had sold their one-week-old daughter to persons unknown, who had been brought to the village by Hemli's brother. The price was said to be 10,000 rupees (£150).
For the poor tribal people, the selling of babies has become one of the few exit points from their grinding poverty. "Will you buy children?" a heavily pregnant woman demanded of an Indian journalist who pulled up in his car in another village in the Lambada belt. "How much will you give me?"
The agents were said by villagers to be the same people who had been prowling around the previous year. The only change was that they had raised their rates previously said to be about 2,000 rupees and they were making inquiries with more discretion. Half of the fee is paid to the sub-agent, who introduces the parents, half goes to the child's natural parents.
On the other side of the world, couples desperate to adopt children are willing to pay £10,000 not including travelling expenses and are forced to wait.
A woman in Pickerington, Ohio, called Cheryl Keller wrote to The Adoption Guide website on 14 November 2000. She described the frustrations that she experienced while trying to adopt twin baby girls from Hyderabad, through an agency called Williams International.
"I applied to Williams in January of 2000," she wrote. "We had decided on adoption because I had unexplained infertility ... Williams called us to tell us they found us twin girls in India ... these girls could be ours as soon as May 2000. A 'wonderful Christian man' ran the orphanage by the name of Peter Subbaiah. The name of the orphanage was Good Samaritan.
"After weeks and weeks of "emotional hell ... sleepless nights", Ms Keller learned the ugly truth about the "wonderful Christian man". Mr Subbaiah had been arrested months before, and as result his orphanage had closed down.
But others are still groping in the dark. "We are in the process of adopting a girl from Hyderabad," wrote one Wade Krohmer last Sunday to an Indian adoption website.
"Our agency has told us there is
a new judge, and he does not like adoptions. They also said police are
investigating agencies for selling babies ... has anyone heard anything
about this?"