"As per intelligence inputs, in the current year, incidents of Maoists forcing at least one child from each family to join the outfit have been reported from areas under police stations Senha (Lohardaga), Bishunpur (Gumla) in Jharkhand and police station Ambabeda (Kanker) in Chhattisgarh," minister of state for home Haribhai Parthibhai Chaudhary informed Lok Sabha in reply to a question on Tuesday.
Chaudhary said CPI (Maoist) was known to recruit minors, both boys and girls, from Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Odisha. In Bihar and Jharkhand, these children are enrolled in 'Bal Dasta' and in Chhattisgarh and Odisha, the children's squad is known as 'Bal Sangham'. "The idea behind recruiting tribal children is to wean them away from their rich traditional cultural moorings and indoctrinate them into Maoist ideology," the minister said.
The child recruits are utilized as informers and for fighting with non-lethal weapons like sticks. Once they are 12, they are made to join children units like 'Chaitanya Natya Manch', sanghams, jan militia and dalams. In sanghams, jan militia and dalams, CPI (Maoist) trains children to handle IEDs, besides making them participate in armed exchanges where they are tactically pushed to the forefront. "This is to derive propaganda mileage by CPI (Maoist) in case of casualties of minors," the minister informed Lok Sabha.
The children, said Chaudhary, were not allowed to leave the dalams, and faced severe reprisals including killing of family members if they surrendered to the security forces.
There are, however, no precise estimates of the number of children recruited by CPI (Maoist), according to the government.
To prevent children from being poached upon by CPI (Maoist), the central government, through National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, ran the Bal Bandhu scheme from 2010 to 2013, focusing on children in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Chhattisgarh. The scheme attempted to bring stability in the lives of children and ensure that their entitlement to protection, health, nutrition, sanitation, education and safety were fulfilled through government action.
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