GURGAON: The road to justice can be long. This one cut through nearly 500 villages in Haryana and UP in a search that took five months and burnt more than 10,000km worth of fuel.This was a search to find Anil, a man accused of kidnapping a teenager, making him work as a bonded labourer and torturing him. It began last July after the boy – frail and maimed – was found by locals in Badoli village of Palwal.The 15-year-old has his left arm missing. He was dumped in the middle of nowhere and told to go. Anil, a dairy and water was all he could remember of his captor. He had one more piece of information, that Anil had two daughters, Riya and Siya.Locals alerted police and a PCR van took him to hospital in Nuh. When he was being prepared for surgery, he escaped barefoot and without clothes. In acute pain, the boy climbed into a hilly area and reached Tauru in Nuh and took shelter at a deserted bus stop late at night. He walked back towards Nuh city, where a teacher found him, took him to a local health centre and informed police. His family in Bihar’s Kishanganj was contacted.It took a while for the boy to get over his trauma and reveal his ordeal. “The victim was so traumatised he didn’t initially reveal what happened to him to Palwal or Nuh police,” a Govt Railway Police (GRP) source said. “It was only after a local newspaper in Rohtak published a report about his plight that we got the alert at Bahadurgarh.”GRP filed a case under 75, 79 of Juvenile Justice (care and protection of children) Act, 2015 and under BNS sections 118(2) (voluntarily causing grievous hurt using dangerous weapons or means), 125 (rashness or negligence that endanger human life or personal safety), 127(4) (wrongful confinement for ten days or more), 137 (kidnapping), 146 (unlawful compulsory labour), 289 ( negligent conduct with respect to machinery) and 3(5) (act done by multiple persons) because the boy had gone missing from Bahadurgarh railway station in Jhajjar on May 27.He had got off to find water, wandered too far, and missed his train, Farakka Express, that he was taking from Jind to his native place with his father and brother.When the GRP unit gleaned the details, they were shaken. They learnt the boy’s left arm was shredded in a fodder-cutter and the severed limb was thrown into a waterbody. Soon after the accident, the bleeding minor was driven for hours along highways and then left to cope on his own in Haryana. The captor had not taken him to hospital, just left him there with Rs 7,500 in cash.The boy left his Kishanganj home to work in Kangra in Himachal Pradesh. But when he wished to come back, his father Rishidev and brother Kailash went to Kangra to bring him back. They were on their way to Kishanganj in Farakka Express when the boy separated from them when he got off at Bahadurgarh.On July 29, Rishidev got a call from Nuh police, saying his son had been admitted at PGI Rohtak the next day. “We were devastated to see him in such a miserable condition. He told me that his employer and his family didn’t give him proper food or let him wear slippers,” Rishidev said in his police statement.By Nov, the boy had undergone three surgeries. But the search for Anil went nowhere. The family lost hope and took him back to Kishanganj.The GRP unit, however, did not quit. They had determined they would do whatever they could to get justice to a boy no one really was looking out for.While he recovered, GRP officials had begun reaching out to sarpanches with the clues they had – dairy owner Anil, two daughters Riya and Siya. They began with Haryana districts, mapped out possible areas based on his description of a waterbody. Initially, the search focused on villages around stormwater drains. Parallelly, GRP approached the Haryana education department, CBSE and other state boards to scan enrolment records for any Anil with daughters Riya and Siya. This digital sweep zeroed in on 20 potential matches. Cops visited every single one of them, but none owned a dairy.A breakthrough eventually came during one of the searches in Nov, an official recalled, when the boy was accompanying a GRP team in Delhi and pointed to silt along Yamuna banks. “He said Anil’s farm had the same soil,” the official said. GRP teams now knew they had to look along the Yamuna.GRP teams began scanning villages along Yamuna in Haryana, Delhi and UP to look for Anil. Often, officials said, they exceeded sanctioned spending on fuel, so the investigators paid out of their own pockets to keep the search going. On Dec 30, the GRP finally found the Anil they were looking for, a 28-year-old dairy owner at Motipur village of Greater Noida.Led by SP Nitika Gahlaut and inspector Satya Prakash, GRP teams from Ambala, Rohtak, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Panipat and Sonipat were involved in the pursuit on Anil. They leant that Anil had thrown the boy’s arm into the river and driven him to Palwal 100km away.Anil told police he “got frightened” after the accident. “The accused had gone to a colony near Bahadurgarh railway station when he saw the tearful boy and decided to take him with him for work,” a source said.For police, it was all about clinging to hope. “We wanted to get justice for a kid who lost his arm and was abandoned in pain on a road. Though the family gave up hope, our SP Nitika Gahlaut encouraged us to nab the accused even when all resources were exhausted,” said Satya Prakash, who led the trail despite his transfer to Ambala.
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