Heart bleeds to see the children hanging on their 'Rented Mothers' who bang on the car windows, run across the roads chasing bikers, or sit lost in the railways stations and
bus stands with children sleeping silently in the laps. The mothers look equally innocent besides the fact that they are part of a huge child trafficking racket without even knowing about it. Both the rented mothers and the children are dusty, pale, mal-nourished and destitute. They wear torn clothes, carry empty milk bottles and equally dusty bags carrying one set of clothes and not sure what else. But the fact that these children are sleeping all the time is 'alarming'. The Big Question is Why are these children sleeping all the time.
Every day on the way to office, a woman with a child used to bang on our car door asking for few pennies. Though I used to feel sad, I always felt the need not to encourage this begging. But to my dismay and shock, this woman started carry different children every other day. The child varied from 3 months to 3 years and most of the time, the Child is again Sleeping!
Moreover, the child at times have a broken arm or a bandaged leg. Why? 
How is the Child Hurt? And the Big Question is Why is the Child Sleeping every time I see during the same time of the day ? Do children sleep so and all the time? The same lady on the way back also used to carry the kid still sleeping. After months of observations, I wanted to stop the car, and get to the lady. The minute I did, she ran away. I could see a fear in her eyes, haste in her legs and tremors in the body. One auto driver standing next to me, said that there is no use trying to find her.
They are controlled by the big gangs who in turn rob / kidnap or buy these children, rent them to the women on daily basis, and take away a huge part of their begging collection. What is further more alarming is that these children are fed with Vodka and Drugs so that they just keep sleeping and hanging on to the woman's shoulder bags. The fact that no real mother would use the sick/ mal-nourished child for begging makes us feel more at discomfort seeing these 'Young mom's... sometime, we see them as young as 12 years old and they themselves look like children.
Feeling Sad, sick and frustrated and equally not able to do anything about this, I thought I can least vent my sadness in my blog so that someone will give me a hope for a solution to this menace we see in every day routine. The least I could do is not to give alms to these beggar women . Unless we have law to stop begging, governments to rehabilitate destitute women, and safeguard our children from the clutches of this cruel business, we will still be seeing this horror stories on the streets every day.
Pictures here speak volumes than my words and most of them are sourced from the internet
