Yadadri child sex racket: Girls kept in small pits

The revered Vaishanavite temple town of Yadadri, located 62 km from Hyderabad on the Warangal highway, has become a centre for child trafficking with hundreds of abducted or purchased girls forcibly pushed into the flesh trade by giving them hormone injections for early puberty.

The Rachakonda Police Commissionerate, under whose jurisdiction the temple town falls, raided few houses on August 2 and arrested some of the kingpins who had a wide network of traffickers all over the Telugu states. Police rescued 15 children from traffickers and arrested 14 people and a doctor (Registered Medical Practitioner), who was administering hormonal injections to the young girls. During one of the raids, they located a few underground bunkers in those houses where the girls were hidden during police raids.

A routine check by the police led to a heartwrenching reality that the girls were not only kept in those small pits which are also used as torture chambers if they refuse to cooperate in the trade. The police further realised that over 100 families suddenly vanished from Yadadri town following the August 2 raid. It is said that the families involved in the child sex racket might have shifted the girls to some other place until the heat generated by the police subsided.

Meanwhile, parents from different parts of the Telugu states started flocking Yadradri and the police commissionerate with the pictures of their missing girl children. With this, the Rachakonda police decided to go for a DNA test to confirm their parenthood before handing over the children to the couples. Marripally Krishna and Anuradha from ECIL in Kushaiguda here, Makkam Ishwaramma and Chinna Dibbaiah from Gobburu village of Peddaraveedu Mandal in Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh, submitted identity proofs and FIR copies of the missing complaints claiming that their daughters were among the girls rescued.

“We have compared the photos with the children rescued from the clutches of the traffickers. There are similarities but we need scientific proof to match their lineage. But, we cannot directly hand over the children to them. So we are sending the blood samples for DNA test,” Yadadri Inspector P Ashok Kumar said.

The Telangana government, which is developing Yadagirigutta into Yadadri by spending hundreds of crores, is also very keen to wipe away the unholy business of child trafficking and abuse from the town located in erstwhile Nalgonda district.