New Delhi: In a curious case, a mother sold her 14-month-old boy for Rs5,000 (Dh350) and bought a new mobile phone, memory cards, a pair of jeans and some shirts.
Rakhi Patra, resident of Mundamala village in Odisha’s Jaipur district, claimed that she sold the child to meet the legal expenses of her husband who was in prison.
The case came to light during investigations conducted after media reports about the sale of the child. The court directed the police to recover the baby and hand it over to the mother.
Jaipur Superintendent of Police Deepak Kumar told Gulf News: “What was more bizarre was the fact that after so much effort to recover the baby from Cuttack, when we handed over the child to her, the mother refused to take him back.”
Police, suspicious of the woman’s story, searched her house. “That’s when her new acquisitions were seized. We were left with no choice but to hand over the baby to the Child Welfare Committee,” Kumar said. She and her aide, a rickshaw puller, had sold the baby to a villager in Cuttack.
