A businessman and his wife have been arrested in Madhya Pradesh after abandoning a two-and-a-half-year-old girl on a national highway — a child, police say, they had purchased through an illegal trafficking network for Rs 1 lakh, and whom they later discarded because they believed she had brought financial misfortune to their family.
The toddler was found wandering alone near Soikalan on the Tonk-Chirgaon National Highway in Sheopur district on April 18 by a brick kiln worker, who immediately alerted the emergency response line Dial 112.
According to Free Press Journal, police officials rushed to the scene, and the child — too young to identify herself or name her guardians — was placed in the care of the Child Welfare Committee before being transferred to a One Stop Centre.
What earlier began as a case of child abandonment rapidly unravelled into one of the most disturbing child trafficking cases to emerge from central India in recent months, with six arrests made so far and investigators widening their search across multiple cities.
Police identified the accused as petrol pump operator Akash Moondra and his wife Kritika Moondra, who were apprehended near Airport Road in Bhopal, according to a Jagran report.
The breakthrough in the investigation came through an unexpected source: a woman from Bhopal who identified the child through viral social media posts and told police she had worked as the child’s caretaker, as per the The Free Press Journal report. Acting on her information, officers from Manpur police station tracked the couple to the state capital within days.
The couple initially denied having adopted the child at all. Under questioning, however, they confessed to a more disturbing account. During interrogation, the couple reportedly admitted that they had purchased the child for Rs 1 lakh when she was only six days old.
They further told investigators they came to believe the girl had brought financial losses to their business and considered her inauspicious — a belief that ultimately led them to abandon her on a busy national highway.
Akash Moondra’s family publicly distanced itself from the controversy, with his brother telling local authorities that Akash had been living separately for nearly five years and had no regular contact with the family. He confirmed that Akash had suffered significant business setbacks and had shut down some of his petrol pump operations in recent years.
The caretaker’s testimony adds a further disturbing layer to the case. Babita Navik, who claimed to have looked after the girl from the time the couple brought her home as an infant, told police she had been hired at Rs 20,000 a month but was never paid in full. She also alleged that the child was beaten, and said the couple never disclosed how they had obtained her.
During further investigation, police established that the child had not been adopted through any legal process. Instead, officials found she was allegedly procured through an Indore-based parlour operator Neeta Jain, her husband Vaibhav Jain — along with two women from Khargone and Dhar districts who acted as intermediaries in the trafficking chain.
Authorities suspect the network receives children from poor families and sells them as adopted children — a model that investigators say has become disturbingly common, as a nurse in Noida was separately caught attempting to sell a newborn for Rs 2.6 lakh in a recent unrelated case.
