Koteeswaran means "millionaire" in Tamil and when autorickshaw driver Gokulakrishnan and his wife Geetha of Chennai named their son so, they may have hoped to alleviate the misery of their poverty- ridden lives. But the misery was compounded when on January 5, 2000, the two-year-old boy went missing from their Thousand Lights home. Last week, however, he was found again a few kilometres away in T. Nagar, staying with his adopted parents after the Chennai Police unearthed a racket run by an adoption agency that sold kidnapped children like Koteeswaran.

The shocking tale of a flourishing trade in child trafficking unfolded on May 3 when the police arrested a bootlegger, Sheikh Mohammed. On interrogation he revealed that he and his brother-in- law were also involved in "arranging" for children to be sent abroad. Several more arrests led the police to Manoharan who was the conduit between the kidnappers and Malaysia Social Service Centre (MSSC), the adoption agency.

The Central Crime Branch (CCB) then took over the investigation. With the arrest of P. Ravindranath, who ran MSSC, his wife Vatsala and son Dinesh Kumar, it came to light that between 1991 and 2002 the agency had sent at least 125 children to various countries, including Australia, Finland and the Netherlands. Flouting the extremely stringent adoptionrules in India and abroad, the agency had indulged in forgery, falsification of documents and, above all, abetting of kidnapping. "Certificates of the Juvenile Welfare Board, Social Defence Department and Social Welfare Department appear to be forged. The racketeers obviously had connections in high places," says a police officer. "It operated at various levels and included gangs for kidnapping, forgery and mobilisation of funds from abroad." A school, a children's home and a creche, which Ravindranath claims to have been running, may have been sources for foreign funds.

While the financial details are being probed, what is appalling is that MSSC was given a clean chit in 2000 by none other than the Tamil Nadu Police. The Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW), one of the scrutinising agencies for adoption-related applications, had submitted a report on serious lapses in the functioning of the MSSC to the Madras High Court, which then suggested a police probe. But the police had failed to find anything then. Also MSSC did not renew its licence in 2002 after 11 years of functioning.

Now as the CCB tries to trace the 325 children who went missing in recent years, CCB Assistant Commissioner and investigating officer Augustine Daniel says the actual number ofchildren sold by Ravindranath could be much higher. From the albums at MSSC, sevenchildren who went missing since 1991 were found to be adopted by families in different countries. It appears that MSSC's prime source of children were the kidnapping gangs. Two of the accused-Sabeera and Noujut-were allegedly the main kidnappers. Each child fetched them Rs 10,000, of which Manoharan pocketed Rs 1,000. While Ravindranath says he got $1,000 (Rs 43,000) for every child sent abroad, the police suspect the amount to be as high as $50,000 per child.

"The most vulnerable were children who slept on pavements," says Daniel. "When the parents slept, the kidnappers would pick up children aged under two-and-a-half years." In fact Gokulakrishnan and Geetha were alerted when they saw the photo of Sabeera in the newspapers and recalled her as a frequent visitor to the locality. The couple now face legal hassles before they can claim their son.

The case is also set to take an interesting turn. One of the parents, M. Dekla, a fisherwoman from Kotapalli village in Tirunelveli, has complained that MSSC had taken two of her childrenin 1998 to Germany "to provide education", but refused to give any details of them for the past five years. The children, Miguel and Melissa, now 15 and 14 years old, have reportedly been adopted by a German couple. Police sources say that besides kidnapping, the gang may have "bought" children from poor families. Parents like Dekla were offered Rs 1,000 a month for a few months.

While this is the first such international racket to be unearthed in Tamil Nadu, child traffickingacross state borders is rampant. Police and NGOs confide that a number of scams works overtime in the poverty-stricken pockets of Villupuram, Theni, Kambam, Madurai, Thenkasi and Chennai. Hundreds of children are taken by agents to Kerala to be employed as domestic helps. Their parents are offered a few thousand rupees in the first few months after which payment is stopped. Worse is the plight of children in the 10-14 age group who are taken to Maharashtra and Gujarat to be employed under excruciating conditions in sweet-making units.

NGOs blame the police for not taking the cases of missing children seriously. Says C. Nambi, convener of the NGO Campaign Against Child Trafficking: "After putting up an advertisement about the missing child, the police don't follow up the case. In this case one child went missing from the Thousand Lights police station limits and was given away for adoption in T. Nagar, which is under the jurisdiction of a nearby police station."

As details of the case are highlighted in the media, many parents have come flocking to the city police commissioner's office with photographs of their missing children, hoping to be reunited with them. Given the brazen way in which MSSC conducted its vicious trade and got away with it, one can only hope the investigation will this time nail the bigger fish who enabled it to thrive for over a decade.