'10, not 5 girls were raped at Panvel home'

MUMBAI: A detailed medical examination by the state has added five more girls to the list of mentally challenged inmates of a Panvel shelter home who were raped by those who were supposed to look after them.

There is also evidence of the girls being subjected to brutality, stated the report of the medical tests conducted by the state women and child development department. "Some of them had marks around their necks," assistant commissioner of police (Bhiwandi) Rashmi Karandikar said before a high court bench of Chief Justice Mohit Shah and Justice Dhananjay Chandrachud on Thursday afternoon. The plight of the Panvel girls came to light after the Bombay high court took suo motu cognizance of a newspaper report on mentally challenged children being starved and raped at an orphanage in Thane and set up a committee to inspect all shelter homes in the state.

An inquiry by the committee, headed by Asha Bajpai from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, revealed sexual abuse at the Panvel home a month ago, when five girls were found to have been raped. After the discovery, Bajpai and psychiatrist Dr Harish Shetty, also a member of the committee, castigated the state department of women and child development for granting licences to shelter homes like those in Thane and Panvel, which had absolutely no facilities to take care of mentally challenged children and on top, abused them, mentally and physically.

The department of women and child development is also supposed to conduct regular inspections of the children's homes. However, none of the their reports showed any hint of the atrocities going on there. The Chief Justice has ordered the department to submit reports of their inspections over the past three years to the HC-appointed committee.