Brides from Telangana in Bhuj — but most of them are children

D V Maheshwari

Posted online: Friday, June 06, 2008 Express India

Bhuj, June 5: Navagam, a nondescript village in Anjar taluka of eastern Kutch is remotely connected with Mallipalli, a poor village in Karimnagar district of Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh. But this Kutch village boasts of all least four brides, all minor teenagers and allegedly sold off by their relatives in Mallipalli to farmers here.

On a tip off from the local media, the Anjar police raided the village on Wednesday and found Sapana, a 14-year-old Class IX student married off to one Karamsi Rakhiya Rabari, a middle-aged villager. The police also discovered that Jyoti, 17, from the same Andhra village has been married off to one Govind Pala of this Anjar village. The girl even has a nine-month old baby girl from the marriage.

Harish Bhatia, a local journalist who accompanied the police party said Sapana told them of three more teenaged girls from her state who have been sold off to villagers here. But only Jyoti, her cousin, could be traced. Bhatia said two other girls were in nearby Junagam, but when the police went to the village, the girls’ middle-aged husbands could not be traced.

Police officials said Sapana’s age was wrongly mentioned as 20 in an affidavit filed before a local notary, and that of her husband as 26. The villagers did not reveal that the husbands of these two teenaged girls were middle-aged. The police have now recovered the affidavit but say language barrier is creating roadblocks in the investigation process. The girls are able to converse only in broken Hindi, they said.

Sources in the police team told this paper that Sapana did not like her parents or her Kutchi husband and wanted to go back to her mother’s sister. “She told us that her maternal uncle sold her off to the elder brother of her husband for Rs 40,000 and that the latter had come all the way to their village at Mallipalli to buy her,” they said. (ఇంకా…)