Child sleeping on street goes missing

CHENNAI: A three-month-old girl was reportedly stolen from a roadside platform in Kilpauk where she was sleeping besides her mother and other family members in a makeshift tent in the wee hours of Tuesday.
The child’s family members told police about seeing some men in a share autorickshaw parked on the road near their ‘home’ and said they suspected she may have been taken away by them.
“The missing girl and her twin sister are yet to be named. We called both of them ‘Paapa’. The missing girl was bitten by a stray dog on last Friday while she was asleep in the tent and was injured in the face and legs. She was treated at the Institute of Child Health in Egmore,” her mother M Kalaiyarasi told TOI, tears rolling down her cheeks.
Kalaiyarasi, who was sleeping between her twin daughters, said she woke up suddenly in the middle of the night and saw a share autorickshaw, its engine running, parked nearby. A short while after the share autorickshaw left, Kalaiyarasi said, she again woke up and found her injured daughter missing.
The family immediately lodged a complaint with the Kilpauk police who registered a case and launched a hunt for the culprits. “Special teams led by Kilpauk assistant commissioner of police S Rajaram have been formed to nab the culprits,” deputy commissioner of police K Bhavaneeshwari said.
“Many vendors of vegetables, flowers and fruit going to the Koyambedu wholesale market early in the morning for purchases often stop by at the nearby Paathala Ponniamman Temple. I saw the share autorickshaw but thought it belonged to some vendor,” Kalaiyarasi’s sister Thangam, a maid, said.
Mangayarkarasi, another sister who also works as a maid, said, “Kalaiyarasi delivered twins at the ICH in March after a major surgery and is still visiting the hospital for treatment.”
Kalaiyarasi and her husband Mani, who works in a fast food outlet opposite their tent, have two other children — Vishnu, 3, and Karuthamma, 2. The couple planned to return to their native village of Govindapuram near Tindivanam, police said.
At least 10 families have been living for a long time in makeshift tents in the area, police said. While most of the women work as maids in nearby apartment complexes, some of the men are employed in small shops or at construction sites. A few others are said to sit outside the Paathala Ponniamman Temple on Barnaby Road seeking alms, police said. Several attempts had been made to evict these platform dwellers and all had failed, they said.