This story is so horrifying that it seems unbelievable. It has all the makings of a human rights emergency and a nightmare that must end. RLTV
By ANDREW MALONE
Within minutes, a couple emerged from the crowd and approached him. They gave him cakes and said they’d take him away to start a better life.
?I thought they were maybe social workers or religious people,’ he told me.
But Aamir’s food was drugged and when he became drowsy, the couple put him in a rickshaw and took him to the city’s municipal hospital, which is where the real nightmare began.
For at the hospital, a doctor was paid to amputate one of his healthy legs. Now speaking in the third person, as if to pretend it didn’t happen to him, Aamir tells me ?the child’ was in ?great pain’ after the operation.
?The leg is removed here,’ he says, pointing to his own stump and grimacing. His limb had been severed mid-calf, leaving him without a foot.
Now in hiding after being rescued from the hospital by a charity, Aamir is one of hundreds of Indian children deliberately crippled by gangs so they can earn extra money begging. He still struggles to talk about his experience.
. . .
Yet the truth, as I discovered during a chilling week-long investigation, is more disturbing than anything dreamt up by the creators of Slumdog Millionaire.
For in Mumbai, as well as in other major Indian cities, hundreds of young children have had their arms and legs chopped off; scores of others have been blinded. The gangs also pour acid on to the children’s bodies, leaving them with suppurating wounds.
A happy ending for the stars of the film Slumdog Millionaire – but for real slum dwellers the future is bleak
Their suffering comes down to one thing: money. In a country of 1.2 billion people, where the gulf between rich and poor is vast, there are an estimated 300,000 child beggars.
By no means all are mutilated by the beggar mafia, but those with the worst injuries do make the most money – up to £10 a day for deformed children, a fortune in a country where millions survive on just a tenth of that.
Not that Aamir and Dalbeer saw any of their earnings. After being crippled and put to work on the streets, the children are forced to hand over the cash to gang masters each evening. And if they don’t hit their ?targets’, they are beaten and tortured.
Read the full story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1127056/The-real-Slumdog-Millionaires-Behind-cinema-fantasy-mafia-gangs-deliberately-crippling-children-profit.html