Baby-selling racket in Ranchi: Missionaries of Charity says action being taken to ascertain truth

Kolkata/Ranchi: A day after the Jharkhand Police claimed to have rescued the third child allegedly "sold" by a Ranchi shelter home run by Mother Teresa-founded Missionaries of Charity (MoC), the order's headquarters in Kolkata on Thursday said it stood by its earlier statement that necessary action was being taken to find out the truth. "We have nothing more to add. As stated earlier, the MoC is looking into the charges against the accused employees in Jharkhand with all seriousness. We will take every necessary action to find out the truth," Sunita Kumar, spokesperson of the organisation, told PTI.

The shelter home run by the Missionaries of Charity at Jail Road in Ranchi. Reuters

"The MoC will refrain from giving any more interviews on this matter now," she said. The order had, on 6 July, said such alleged incidents "went totally against the values and ethics espoused by the Missionaries of Charity (MoC), the nuns and its founder and was shocking for everyone in the organisation".

Kumar, in the 6 July statement, had said the MoC had stopped giving children for adoption three years ago and had never asked for money from the adopting parents. Senior Superintendent of Police Anis Gupta had on Wednesday said four children were allegedly "sold" by the MoC shelter home, "Nirmal Hriday", in Ranchi and the third child was rescued on Wednesday from Simdega.

A few persons were detained for questioning in this regard, he had said, adding that the search for the fourth child was on. The police had said they came to know about the child "sold" in Simdega after questioning two persons arrested in this connection.

The four babies were "sold" from the shelter home over the last one year, the police had said, adding that all the three rescued babies were sent to another shelter home. Kumar said the MoC was aware of the tweets by a Catholic Bishops organisation yesterday that a "deliberate attempt" was being made to "malign" the order, but refused to comment on it.

"This is a deliberate attempt to malign one of the world's and India's most loved institutions, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. The truth will come out," Catholic Church India, the twitter handle of Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, the secretary general of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, had tweeted. "The sisters of MoC are simple innocent sisters who cannot match the manipulations of the crooked," Mascarenhas had said.