Cheating case against Ullal adoption centre

Publication date: 9 November 2013

Stanley Pinto, TNN | Nov 9, 2013, 03.16 AM IST

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MANGALORE: Ullal police have registered a case of cheating against Nirmala Social Welfare Centre in Ullal based on their investigations into the Indian-born German national Chaya Maria Schupp's case.

The investigating officer said after preliminary investigations, they could not find any document relating to Chaya. Also, a police officer who had gone to Grace Kennet Foundation, Madurai, where Chaya stayed before leaving for Germany according to her adoption papers, returned empty handed.

In March this year, the Karnataka high court had directed Ullal police to assist Chaya in her search for her biological mother.

The investigating officer added, "The foundation has sought a month's time to trace the papers."

Chaya, 36-year-old resident of Dieburg, in southern Germany, was adopted by a German couple when she was about six years old under suspicious circumstances.

Chaya is doing her doctorate on sex workers in Mumbai as part of an exchange programme between the University of Kassel, Germany and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. She has been working on her thesis for three years.

Chaya's search for her biological mother met a dead end in 2009 when authorities at the welfare centre refused to show her the relevant records. The centre had a licence for inter-country adoptions but it did not renew this licence.

Chaya asserts that she was at this centre when she was adopted. The papers at Pro Infante, a German adoption agency, clearly show she was under the centre's care at the time of adoption.

Though Chaya says she was born a Hindu in Ullal, there is a certificate of baptism issued by St Sebastian's Church, Permannur (Ullal). It states she was baptized on January 15, 1980.

When Chaya went there, the parish priest said there were no records about her baptism.

Chaya said the baptism may have been done because the German couple who adopted her wanted a Christian child.

Her adoption was done through Maxim Lobo, a retired district and sessions judge of the Madras Court in the Madurai court on March 18, 1981. Interestingly, the letter written by Lobo to her adopted parents, Ingrid and Wolfgang Schupp, Frankfurt, states ther