A home for the mentally challenged was being run without doctors, facilities or licenses for over two decades.
Lack of supervision and enforcement and the lackadaisical attitude of the Government and its officers are the sole reasons for mushrooming orphanages and homes for a child and women, asylums for mentally ill people, re-addiction centres by NGOs, fly-by-night and fake entities from minority communities. In Villupuram, Anbu Jothi Ashramam, run by John baby, has hit the headlines for the wrong reasons.
It came to the fore after a US resident Salim Khan moved the Madras High Court to get the authorities to act on his complaint that his father-in-law Jawahirullah was missing from the private shelter home where he was admitted in December 2021. The home told him that he was in Bangalore, but where he could not be found. So he moved the court.
Villupuram SP Shreenatha told the media, “A police team visited a home in Bengaluru where 15 inmates were sent. The Bengaluru home has records of receiving 15 people from the Villupuram home. The Bengaluru home claimed that the 15 inmates broke open the window and escaped from the Villupuram facility.
A survivor, who came as a teenager from Odisha through a ‘rescue’ group that took her to Anbu Jothi Ashram, said she was repeatedly raped, beaten up and threatened.
“When she tried to resist, the employees set on them two ferocious monkeys the owner kept in a cage,” the report quoted R Lalitha, a volunteer with Social Awareness Society for Youth, as saying. The group is looking after the survivors now. Another survivor recounts several women were chained to window grilles, drugged using sleeping pills and raped, adding that those who bid to resist were beaten with iron rods and attacked by the monkeys.
Police arrested eight people, including the owners of the shelter home, B Jubin Baby and his wife, C Mariya, over complaints of sexual assault and torture against inmates housed at an unlicensed shelter home.
The home has been functioning since 2005; for over two decades, the home functioned thanks to the Government officers concerned in not taking the necessary action to close the unlicensed home. It does not have licences to run the home either from the Directorate of Child Welfare under the social welfare department or commissionerate for the welfare of the differently abled, which is under the direct purview of the Chief Minister.
The Government knows the home but keeps silent due to reasons best known to them. They knew there had been violations of all sorts. The house administrators worked closely with Government hospitals and police to cremate unclaimed bodies.
Mental Health institute director M Malaiappan said that last September, the mental health authorities refused to grant the license as it had no psychiatrist or doctor and no adequate social workers, psychologists, or nurses to attend to the inmates. “The licence is a must for such homes. “A team led by retired judge Shanmughanathan after visiting the home, said in its report, “there were 150 men and 30 women with mental illness, but it did not have adequate facilities, and there was no mention of abuse, he said, quoting the same. Officials said the inadequate member of officers in the district makes monitoring every such home difficult.
Meanwhile, police rescued 25 more inmates, 13 of them women, from another home for the mentally ill, which was being run clandestinely at Kottuppakkam village near Puducherry, 50 km from the Villupuram home from where 140 inmates were rescued on February 12. They have been shifted to Government homes or admitted at the Government Villupuram medical college for treatment.
Also, the home alleged to have misused the prescription of mentally challenged inmates to Ponicherry Institute of Medical Science (PIMS) and got doctors there to prescribe sedative medicines for them. Among the 140 odd inmates, only a few require sedative medication and professional care. Inmates are deserted by their families or voluntarily admitted by their families.
According to police, Jubine had very contacts with medical stores and created a good rapport by showing articles praising the home, which helped him to gain their confidence and without giving room for any suspicion to get the required medicine for misuse and earn profit. It is learnt that he would compel the women inmates to take such medication at night so that he could sexually assault them. Whenever their relatives came to see them, he would keep them in a soothing state so they would not narrate their sufferings.
On February 15, police arrested Jubine’s wife, Maria and three staff on charges of rape and illegal detention, while four others from the ashram were arrested on February 13. Jubine, who admitted himself to the Villupuram medical college hospital, is yet to be arrested.
Police are investigating charges like the home used to cremate or bury unidentified or unclaimed bodies in secluded regions in the village. The police are preparing a list of people who have disappeared from their homes and are in touch with their Bengaluru counterparts.
In February 2018, 86 elderly inmates of the St Joseph’s Hospice, a home for the dying in Kancheepuram, were sealed following complaints by locals of ill-treatment of inmates and reports of the expiry of the homes’ license to operate. When an older woman and a man were found being transported in a van along with the dead body of another old man, passers-by reportedly heard the woman wailing in the van, stopped the vehicle and discovered the two elders.
The hospice, which calls itself a ‘Home for Dying Destitute’, was founded in 2006 by Father RV Thomas, a pastor and had branches all over the state. Villagers surrounding the hospice, located at Salavakkam in Chennai’s neighbouring Chengalpattu district, demanding action against the hospice. There have been complaints in the past against St Joseph’s Hospice, with some residents of Palaswaram raising questions over its functioning, alleging that the organisation is involved in an illegal organ trade racket.
The hospice in Tamil Nadu, sealed four years ago for illegalities, is again in the news for starving and physically torturing elderly people recently. Sixty-nine older men and women with injuries and frail health have been rescued from the institution, and 61 have been admitted to Government hospitals for treatment.
A petition by a group of priests submitted to the Kanchipuram collector at that time said that they saw the crackdown against St. Joseph’s Hospice as actions against Christianity and Christian services.
Recently, a Christian school in Chennai was found to be converting Hindu girls. The Chairman of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) had to write to the Chief Secretary and DGP seeking cooperation in rescuing the girls and taking action against the school. But the DMK Government supported the school and refused to act against it.
In September, Pastor Charles, who ran an orphanage home, was arrested for raping a teenager and impregnating her last year at Chengleput. A month earlier, John Robert, a church pastor in Tamil Nadu’s Rameswaram, was arrested under the POCSO Act by the police after members of the child welfare committee filed a complaint that he had sexually harassed young girls who came to church.
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