A pair of nine-month-old twins were rescued from the Kozhikode railway station are now in the custody of ChildLine all thanks to alert bystanders.
It all began when the mother, Jaya, was arrested by the police on charges of stealing vessels from the house of former Assistant Commissioner Bhaskara Kurup.
In fact, the police had been on the lookout for her since 2015, but she always managed to give them the slip as she and her husband, Manickyam, a manual scavenger, used to go from place to place looking for work.
On Tuesday, the couple had brought their twins, Karthik and Karthika, to to a government hospital in Tirur as one of the children was suffering from fever.
However, the police noticed Jaya and took her into custody. They only gave Manickyam a slip of paper on which a number was written.
A Manickyam, not sure of what he had to do, went to the station with the babies. Loading workers at the station noticed Manickyam wandering around, crying. They alerted the Railway Protection Force.
However, by then, passengers had noticed that two babies were lying on the platform, crying. Several of them informed ChildLine about this, who rushed to the spot.
“We got several calls from the passengers as the children were just lying on the platform. While arresting the woman, the police could have informed us of the children, so we could ensure their safety,” Chandran KP, an officer at ChildLine, told TNM.
The Child Welfare Council has now directed the police to move the babies with their mother. Meanwhile, the state Human Rights Commission and the Child Rights Commission have both sought a report into the incident.