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From Our Own Correspondent
India's Missing Children
00:28:08
Anu Anand in Delhi on what happens to the two hundred thousand Indian children each a...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline. But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, the Indian suburb where five children have been snatched in a month. A radical city plan in Kenya. Could it bring Africa the sort of changes seen in Europe's industrial revolution? What's rail travel in China like these days? 16 hours on the all night train to Wuhan gives us ample time for reflection and you don't need to look like your granny. Advice for our correspondent in New York on how to become an anchor on American television. In the Welsh town of Machynllet, the search continues this morning for the missing 5 year old April Jones. A local man has appeared in court charged with abduction and murder. Child abduction cases, at least those not involving parents, are relatively rare in this country. Many more children are, for example, abducted in India, where, according to one estimate, at least 200,000 are snatched every year. Anu Anand in Delhi says hundreds of criminal gangs are said to be involved in selling babies and children to childless couples, while other youngsters are sexually exploited or forced to work as slave Labour.
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It was April 21, 2010, a Wednesday. It was 7:30. A large Hindu prayer meeting was in full swing. Hundreds of people had gathered under a vast multicolored tent held fast by lengths of knobbly bamboo. Speakers blared as the faithful sang. Babies slept through the noise fanned by their mothers. Six year old Kajal could hear the singing from her family's tiny rented room just down the road. Her father was at his push barrow in the local market selling clothes. Her brothers and sisters were playing in the roofless courtyard shared with four other families in this ramshackle settlement in northwest Delhi on the city's outermost periphery. Kajal told her mother she wanted to go to the prayer meeting. I'll lock up and come with you, said her mother, Hema. Minutes later, as Hema emerged onto their unpaved lane choked with debris, the Kajal was gone. Hema continued to the prayer meeting but didn't find her. She and her husband combed their neighborhood, part village, part urban slum, all night and all the next day, they questioned school children picking their way through ditches full of submerged plastic bags. They dodged tractors and bullock carts on the main road. They stopped at shops selling rough lengths of timber and sacks of salty fried lentils tastes to ask if anyone had seen their daughter they went to the police, who promised to search but did nothing. We've been looking ever since, says Rajkumar, Kajal's father. He gingerly removes a sheaf of papers from a faded denim satchel and unfolds a large poster bearing the photos of five children, all taken here in the same month. They include Gajal. She has his intelligent eyes and Hema's dainty lips. Rajkumar speaks of his ordeal sitting on a plastic chair in the midday sun. His long, expressive hands rise and fall. He has loose teeth, salt and pepper hair. And the lean body of a man who earns just enough to eat. No one believes the poor, he says. The police taunt us. You probably sold them. You probably didn't feed them. They probably just ran away. Desperate, he, he and the other parents pooled their meager savings. They printed the missing posters, distributing them in all directions. They petitioned local leaders. They held protests, news conferences. A reward of 51,000 rupees was offered for information, a sum it takes Rajkumar two years to earn. Save the Childhood, a leading Indian child rights organization, has compiled the only national statistics on abductions. It estimates that at least 200,000 children go missing in India every year. Most never return. Just minutes away, in another impoverished neighborhood, activists helped stop an adoption racket in which babies were being sold to childless couples for 3,000 pounds. Girls are also snatched for prostitution. Some, rescued by NGOs were found to have been given hormone injections to speed up their physical development. Boys are sold to farms, factories, shops and homes as slave labor. Rajkumar takes us to another family nearby. Iqbal Ali's only son, Irfan, was abducted by two men on a motorcycle as he walked home alone in the dark, consumed by grief, Iqbal and his wife Shabnam, shut down their bakery, devoting every waking moment to the search. One evening this August, as they sat watching television, there was a commotion outside. Shabnam climbed the narrow stairs of their cramped first floor flat to have a look. A moment later, jostled forward by the crowd, she suddenly came face to face with her missing son. After a tortured three years, Shabnam says, she burst into tears, paralyzed with happiness and shock. The boy had been taken to a farm where he was forced to work. Eventually, Irfan managed to break a window and escape. And after a news story about him aired on national tv, Ifan was helped home. The police have taken no action. Even though his own daughter is still missing. Rajkumar is clearly delighted at his friend's good fortune. He gleefully points to the family's reopened bakery, where the shelves holding cakes decorated with plump white icing are now papered with those missing posters. It's easy to see how Rajkumar and thousands of other Indian parents must vacillate wildly between hope and despair when their children are taken. But there's one other overriding emotion. Anger. Anger at the utter apathy of society at large. Anger at the authorities, especially the police. They're very efficient at turning up and making money off us, says Rajkumar. They just can't be bothered to look for our children.
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And that's Anu Anand in Delhi. There's a technological revolution going on in Kenya, and it's been driven by the humble mobile phone. In a country where barely a third of the population has access to the Internet, it seems the mobile is helping people in all sorts of unexpected ways. Farmers are using it to help them grow and market their crops more efficiently, while city dwellers are finding it helpful in the fight against corruption. But some have bigger plans for information technology. Gabriel Gatehouse in Nairobi has been to meet a man who believes that it can bring Africa the sort of huge changes seen in Europe during the industrial revolution of 200 years ago.
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Bitange Ndemo is a man with a vision, and in his office on the 10th floor of a soaring Nairobi tower block, he's got a scale model to help him explain it. The permanent secretary at the Ministry of Information and Communication is building a high tech city. It's going to cost him 6 billion pounds, but he says it'll create 200,000 jobs. He sweeps his hand over the Perspex display case containing gleaming matchbox buildings and miniature manicured lawns. Konza Technology City is being built 40 miles outside Nairobi. And, says Dr. Ndemo, it's going to change Kenya. It might even change Africa. Kenya, without a doubt, is at the heart of Africa, he says, and we must create an environment which makes that heart beat. I peered out of the window onto the streets below. The traffic, as always, was at a standstill, gridlocked on Nairobi's crumbling roads. I wondered how anyone was ever going to get out to this tech city and, once out, whether they'd ever want to come back. Earlier that week I'd visited a small farm growing chili peppers in the Nagong Hills, not far outside the city. There I'd met a 25 year old tech entrepreneur by the name of Susan Oguya. She was busy explaining to Charles the chili grower how he could use his mobile phone to become a better farmer. Ms. Ooguya has created an app called MPharm. It allows Charles to find out the wholesale price of chilies at the touch of a button. He can also use it to link up with other farmers to sell their chilies in bulk. It's more of a text message service, really. Most rural Kenyans don't have smartphones, but it does work. Farming paid for my school fees. Susan told me she created the MPharm app to help people like her parents turn their subsistence farms into agribusiness. Across Kenya, from the countryside to the cities, people are coming up with ways to use mobile phones to improve their lives. I met a man who's created an app that allows people to pay their parking fees and fines by mobile phone. This is not merely a convenience. Nairobi's parking attendants wear yellow jackets with the words Corruption is evil emblazoned on the back. I'm not sure it's having the desired effect. Much of the money they collect doesn't reach the city's coffers. Gideon Omodo, the creator of the traffic app, hopes his innovation will generate enough revenue to start improving those atrocious roads back to the ministry and Batanga Ndemu. We're just beginning, he says with a glint of zeal in his eye. He wants to put the whole of Kenya's notoriously corrupt government online. He wants to automate the procurement process. He wants to create a cashless society. Only that way, he believes, can you prevent vast sums of money disappearing into the pockets of corrupt officials. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility. Kenya already has a hugely successful cashless payment system called mpesa. It allows people to transfer money by mobile phone. In a largely rural country with poor infrastructure, that can be a lifeline. M Pesa was set up five years ago. Today it provides a mobile banking service for an estimated 70% of the population. That's roughly the same proportion of that earns its living off the land. Dr. Ndemo believes technological innovation can save the government billions. But he wants to go further than just eliminating corruption. Ndemo also believes that Kenyan's obsession with owning their own little plot to farm has led to an endless subdivision of the land, creating ever increasing numbers of smaller and smaller farms that he says is unsustainable. You need a complete shift in the attitude of Africans, says Ndemo. We must begin rural urbanization, land consolidation. Ndema wants to see large numbers of rural people move off the land and into cities, and the rest to group together into larger, more profitable collective farms. And again, technology will be the driver. Those who leave the land will take up jobs created by the IT sector. Those who stay will be persuaded and helped to create large scale agribusinesses with the aid of apps like Susan Oguya's MPharm. Ndemo's vision is radical. It evokes the vast upheavals of the industrial revolution in Europe, the shift from a rural to a manufacturing economy, the creation of a middle class. Ndemo says he's mindful of the deprivations created during that era, as well as the material gains. But he insists that Africa needs a new paradigm. Fifty years after many countries gained their political independence, the time has come for a shift towards financial independence too. It's a nonsense, he says, that we go out begging for aid money.
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Gabriel Gatehouse In Kenya, there was a state funeral this week for the former president of Algeria, a commander in the army which ousted France in the independence war of the 50s. Shadli Binjaedid became president in 1978 and presided over political reforms which gave the country a multi party system with competitive elections. He was eventually ousted in the military coup which led to a decade of vicious civil war. The state funeral was an event which Chloe Arnold, our correspondent there for many years, followed only from afar. She's now moved on, but has been looking back at her time spent in a country full of contradictions and one, she tells us, desperate to leave the past behind.
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Some weeks ago, a Polish priest came for dinner. Father Chris is a per blanc, a white father, one of a tiny handful of Catholic missionaries living deep in the Sahara Desert. He comes to the capital, Algiers, every once in a while to meet friends and to talk. How had the last year been in the oasis town of Gardaia? We asked him as we tucked into our Chinese takeaway. It was nice to take a break from couscous, he admitted. Things were good, he said. People were kind. Sometimes they'd come into his tiny mission to drink tea and chat. But last Christmas had been tricky because of Sister Colette. Sister Colette lived in Adrar, even deeper in the desert, with a clutch of other nuns. On Christmas Eve, Father Chris had traveled the 600 kilometers south to take mass at the monastery. There he'd spent a happy week in the company of the sisters, and on New Year's Eve, he'd said his farewells. Sister Colette, a sprightly woman in her 70s, accompanied him to the bus, even insisting on carrying his bag, though she was a little under the weather. Half a day later, Father Chris reached home and received a telephone call. Sister Colette had passed away that very morning. Immediately her fellow Nuns had set about finding a coffin and making preparations to transport the body to the Catholic cemetery in Gardaia. But Muslims aren't buried in coffins, and it took some time before they found a carpenter who could put one together. It took even longer to track down the right sort of nails to pin down the coffin lid. There were further delays when the ambulance carrying the coffin it was the only vehicle suitable for the job was forced to return to Adra after they discovered they'd been given the wrong body. Then the next day, the carpenter said he wanted the coffin back because he needed the wood. Father Chris said he hadn't known whether to laugh or cry. They managed to negotiate the cost of keeping the coffin and the nails. And there was more waiting as they prepared the extensive paperwork to bury a foreign national in Algerian soil. Sister Colette was French. She's now peacefully buried in Ghardaia, her death as colorful as her life must have been. For me, the story encapsulates all the contradictions about Algeria today. The staggering bureaucracy. To go for a swim, you must provide a clean bill of health, a blood group certificate and your passport, all translated into Arabic and signed and stamped by the mayor. And eight photographs. But it also shows that with a bit of ingenuity and improvisation, you can get most things done. It's a country where 16 years ago, at the height of a bloody civil war, seven Cistercian monks were murdered, allegedly by Islamist militants in the town of Tiburin. But it's also the place where two years ago, the Basilica of Notre Dame d' Afrique reopened decades after it had slipped into disrepair. The words above the altar read, pray for us, Our lady of Africa, and for all the Muslims. It's a country that missed out on the Arab Spring, that civil war, in some ways the precursor to the region's unrest has left a population traumatized by violence. But it's a nation yearning for change. The leaders, now in their 70s, have been around since Algeria won independence from France 50 years ago. It's a nation stuck in the past. Children still write on slates with chalk at school, and banks use a creaky pneumatic system to move money around the building. But it's a country pushing the boundaries. A recent parliamentary election saw the highest number of women MPs win seats of anywhere in the Arab world. So many they had to build new bathrooms overnight. Previously, there'd been just one cubicle for women in the whole of the parliament building. And it's a country in search of an identity. Arabic's the official language. But a generation of Algerians who were educated under French colonial rule can't read it or read it. Newspapers, books and television broadcasts are in classical Arabic, a language most people struggle to speak. Instead, they use an improvised version of Arabic rich in French, Spanish and Berber, the language of the small non Arab community living to the east of the capital. Father Chris gets up to leave. He has a bus back to Ghadaya early the next morning. It's a long journey, he says, but it gives him time to mull over the contrasts and paradoxes of this vast, enigmatic nation.
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That's Chloe Arnold, no longer in Algiers, now setting up in Warsaw. The Chinese had been getting back to work after their mid autumn festival holiday. Huge numbers of visitors were reported at major tourist sites. One newspaper photo showing crowds stretching to the horizon at the Great Wall near Beijing was captioned the Great Queue of China. The eight day public holiday also saw millions taking to the railways to visit relatives up and down the country. Our Angus Foster boarded a train to see for himself how much China's rail network has benefited from the country's economic transformation.
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16 Hours Sat Bolt upright on a train gives you a bit of time to reflect on how much a country has changed. It had started to go wrong when I got to the ticket booth in China's capital, Beijing, and found a queue snaking around the corner. It was the lead up to the mid autumn holiday and half the city was headed for distant homes. When I asked for a ticket to Wuhan, an all night journey south, the young salesgirl snorted her derision. Tickets were sold out for the next three days. Ying Zuo, she said and looked up as if throwing down a challenge. China's nominally classless Communist Party splits its trains into four classes, from the relative comfort of a four bunk cabin to the most basic and cheapest Yingzhou, or hard seat. When I first travelled Yingzhou in 1986 as a student, it was like being initiated into Chinese peasantry. Chickens and goats swung upside down from luggage racks. Once all the bone breaking wooden seats and standing room were packed. More people clambered through open windows, pulling bags and bundled children behind. The ends of each carriage were invisible through cheap cigarette smoke. 25 years later, was I ready for that challenge? After all, I could have flown to Wuhan. But the chance of regaining a glimpse of the past spurred me to hand over my money. China's rail network, like the country, has been transformed by its economic rise. New lines have been added every year. Steam locomotives have been replaced by diesel and electric engines. Most ambitiously, China assembled the world's longest high speed rail network, buying technology from Germany and Japan and building specialized lines which now levitate above the sprawling suburbs and squeezed agricultural land between its major cities. But then an accident in the eastern city of Wenzhou in 2011 punctured all that ambition. Two high speed trains collided, several carriages derailed. Official reports said 40 people died. An attempted government cover up compounded the loss of trust. The crash was eventually blamed on signalling equipment, which was China's own technology. For many Chinese, the accident seemed to confirm what they had long suspected that the country was developing too fast, cutting corners to catch up with the world, whatever the risks. Almost overnight, the sleek nosed white trains, which had swept aside concerns about their cost rationale or environmental impact, became symbols of new doubts about the very model of China's development. More than a year after the accident, when I told friends in Beijing I was going to Wuhan by train, some asked if I wasn't worried about the risk. I arrived at Beijing West Station during Friday evening rush hour, herded through waiting rooms to a platform long enough for 30 carriages. Each had its own attendant, and mine studied my foreign face and tickets suspiciously, as they always had before. But that was one of the few things that were familiar. Inside the train, a different world unfolded. This wasn't one of the speedy new services. Mine was an all stations rattler, but even so, there were no goats or chickens. People were packed into every corner, but no one boarded through the windows. These had been sealed and air conditioning installed. The hard seats of Ying Zuo were no longer hard. Upholstered now with blue covers. Even the air smelled moderately clean, as each carriage's many smokers dutifully headed for a smoking area near the lavatory. There were not many peasants aboard. In my cubicle of six seats, all five fellow passengers had mobile phones with Internet access. Two had laptops and watched subtitled Hollywood action movies at full volume. They were young and middle aged workers, people who lived in Beijing but didn't have the much prized residency permit that would allow them to settle with their families. They included a cook, a shoe saleswoman, a student, a bottle factory driver. They grumbled about Beijing's rents and food prices, but they also knew they were doing all right, at least compared to people in their hometowns. Of course, it was a snapshot, as unreliable as it is unrepresentative. Half of China's population still lives in the countryside, and the gap between them and the cities gets wider every year. But as we finally trundled into Wuhan, overtaken by yet another sleek nosed high speed train. I asked a fellow traveler about China's upcoming leadership changes. He didn't want to talk about politics. That hadn't changed either. But he said whatever happened in the coming years, and of course there would be setbacks, he was optimistic about his own and China's future.
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That's Angus Foster. You may have heard our man at the Venezuelan election the other day, deciding an old green T shirt was the most appropriate item to wear out reporting on the campaign trail. Ok, there may have been mitigating circumstances. After all, you've got to be careful what colour you wear reporting politics in Venezuela, but the nostalgics among you may still have been heard muttering what was wrong with the old suit and tie. Truth is, correspondents have never had a reputation as snappy dressers. Now, television news readers, that's a different business. The BBC's Laura the Trevelyan in New York has just moved from reporting the news to anchoring it, and it's meant a full scale American style makeover.
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So you're an anchor now? Said my American friends, admiring yet rather puzzled. Are you going to look like an anchor when you're reading the news? They asked, somewhat doubtfully. It was at this moment that I resolved to send myself to anchor school. American style. You the cult of the anchor is central to American TV news and goes back to the earliest days of broadcasting in this country. The unflappable, reassuring, well dressed figure who comes into your home and tells you what's going on is an important part of your life. Americans discuss their favourite anchors incessantly and the TV networks nurture and constantly promote their stars. The BBC has a news broadcast on American TV each day, so I reasoned if I was going to be in American homes at tea time, then I'd better look the part while not losing the BBC sensibility. Of course, my transformation began at home. Amy, the efficient blonde stylist, came round and tried to open the door of my crowded wardrobe. It was not an auspicious beginning. How exactly do you organise your clothes? Amy inquired. Erm, the winter coats are on that side, I offered weakly. I get it, observed Amy. This closet is so full that you just grab the nearest thing and put it on. I was indeed guilty as charged. Amy and her assistant spent a day in the inner recesses of my wardrobe. At one point I thought they'd fallen through and ended up in Narnia, but they were merely throwing out ancient mothballs. At the end of it, Amy assembled a long rack of clothes that I hadn't seen in years. Unless you're sentimentally attached to these, said Amy firmly, I think you should send them to the nearest charity shop. I looked sadly at my trouser suits with padded shoulders circa mid 90s when I was reporting from Northern Ireland and Westminster. Feeling nostalgic, I gestured hopefully in the direction of a red jacket with wide lapels, which had been a particular favourite. Amy shook her head firmly. You don't need to look like your grandmother, she said gently. I was suitably crushed. Next, Amy came round with armfuls of clothes for me to try on. Having tactfully asked if I would prefer to wear designer labels or if I minded clothes from bargain basement outlet malls, she turned up with piles of the latter. The general theme was brightly coloured dresses and fitted shirts and skirts. Not a trouser suit in sight. There, said Amy happily at the end. You don't look too fashion forward, but you are at least of this era. Now that I had a wardrobe, it was time to get my hair cut and learn to apply makeup. Fatima, the young, fashionable Ukrainian hairdresser, looked askance at my so called hairstyle. It's neither long nor short, she declared. It's not doing anything for you. You are too young to have an old lady hairstyle. As Fatima went to work with her multiple pairs of scissors, I reflected upon the irony of my appearance. Having spent my career trying to be authoritative and striving for maturity, I had, it seemed, succeeded in missing out on middle age altogether and become prematurely old. Fatima hacked away and kept up a running commentary about the importance of the hair framing the face on tv. By the end, the floor was strewn with discarded hair and I had an elegant bob. Before going to see Bilji, the Turkish make up artist, I steeled myself for the inevitable. She was going to look at my elderly collection of make up and find it wanting in some way. But no, your colours are good. Bilgey declared after poking through my boxes and trays and making me throw out anything over two years old. least I'd been doing something right all these years, if not very hygienically. After all this palaver, I was ready for my first show. I picked out a navy shirt and a maroon skirt and earrings from Amy's selection. I applied my makeup artfully and sprayed my new hair firmly into place. My friends loyally watched my first show. I waited anxiously for their verdict and was relieved to receive that all American seal of approval. Laura, you were awesome.
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They chorused a thoroughly transformed Laura Trevelyan. No padded shoulders in sight, bringing this edition to a close. I'll be here again on Saturday Morning with more from our own correspondents around the world. Do join us. Goodbye.