G Sasidharan, then a novice programme officer with the Kerala State Council for Child Welfare (KSCCW), remembers the day like it was only yesterday. It was on the eve of Christmas in 2002. Around 1:30 am, when most of Thiruvananthapuram had drifted off to sleep, a siren rang in the nursing station inside the KSCCW, then nestled in a small building on Gandhi Bhavan Road, he said.
It was a watershed moment – a baby had been ‘received’ at the ‘Ammathottil’ (mother cradle) facility in front of the building.
Once an infant is received in an ‘ammathottil’, the information is relayed to the nearest police station and the child welfare committee (CWC), underlined Gopi. After being administered first aid, the infant is shifted to a government hospital for a medical check-up. The KSCCW headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram has elaborate nursing facilities for infants, including wards and special rooms. Paediatricians from government hospitals drop in when required to check up on the children.
If parents turn up to reclaim their children within the stipulated 60-day time period, necessary DNA tests are conducted to verify the claim. In the last three years, there have been 4-5 such cases of parents coming forward to stake claims, the general secretary said. It has a staff strength of 110 comprising ayahs, caretakers, nursing supervisors, social workers and counsellors, all of whom are contractual employees, working in shifts round the clock.
“We were all curious and interested, to see what she looked like. It was a big deal. “She stayed with us for about a year before being adopted by a family. The arrival of Nithya and her subsequent adoption was vindication for those like Sasidharan and others at KSCCW that the idea and the system worked. It’s a modest electronic cradle, in a cabin with electronic doors and sensors that would light up and send signals when a baby is placed in it. The parents can quietly slip away while the baby gets turned over to the safe guardianship of the State. A woman may have been forced to become a mother for several reasons. She must not be made to feel like a criminal. The society must not grill her. Only then can this problem be solved to a large extent,” he added.
On November 14, Children’s Day, 2002, MK Muneer, then minister for social justice, had inaugurated ‘Ammathottil’ – a project that grants parents a safe, anonymous way to give up their infants rather than abandoning them or causing harm to them. “But, due to various social factors, people are forced to surrender their children at our facilities.
She was named Nithya,” said Sasidharan, now a legal consultant and personal assistant to the KSCCW general secretary.
In one incident, an abandoned infant, just days old, was found to have been mauled and dragged away by stray dogs outside the SAT Hospital in Thiruvananthapuram city that year – a case that had huge ramifications in Kerala, a state known for superior health infrastructure. In another incident, a baby left behind in a rubber estate was found to be swarming with ants and worms.
