“Today whenever you dole out a note of currency to a beggar or a child seeking donation, know that you’re contributing to child trafficking. We have all seen those little kids who come knocking on our car windows asking for money. But do we ever wonder where that money goes? Way back in 2014 coming across these instances of kids visiting the same places and asking money for the same NGO made me wonder. What I wasn’t prepared for was that there was a huge mafia behind this. Kids are kidnapped from different places like Andhra and Trichy and many other parts of India.

They are then given dope which would make them sleep all through the day. These kids are then carried around for getting money on the grounds of sympathy. The sad part is that, these kids don’t get to live beyond 5-6 years. They money is snatched from them and they are hardly given any meals or proper nutrition so they die an awful death at a very young age.

I noticed a very similar pattern with people asking money for orphanages. You would be surprised to know that they are big corporations behind it. They hire young adults and females to go around carrying a box and asking for money. They specifically target different places in the city where the wealthy population frequently and earn anywhere between 4-5 L PM. The corporation sends a portion of it to the NGO and takes over the rest.

Coming to know about it gave me many sleepless nights. Determined to expose them, I tried reaching out to human resources and social work but to no avail. We started to receive threatening calls from them and they were prepared to shut us up for money. Even the police officials couldn’t do much in this regard and after a lot of contemplation, we had to drop it. But thinking about how we as a society collectively contribute to human and child trafficking even today is appalling to say the least.

NGOs have lost their trust worthiness and it’s hard to trust any NGO because you never know! To anyone reading this, I would honestly urge you to stop encouraging begging. The more you try and show your magnanimity by doling out notes, the more you can contributing to the mafia that is undertaking this.”