He was a Child & Now an Adult . Where will he go from Here !
When the little child of 14 years who had no knowledge of his name , family or even from where he had come to Koraput was wandering in the crowd of Sri Gundicha jatra at Koraput in June this year , Childline rescued him with the help of Koraput police .He was brought to the open shelter for children being managed by Sova at Chapar in Koraput block area . Other children in the shelter loved to call him as PK as he was looking like the funny character in Hindi film . Since then he started responding to the name PK and nothing else . He was a mentally challenged child who had lost his way , said Sanjit patnaik , secretary of Sova ,Koraput .
He had a train ticket in his pocket to Bhubaneswar from Guntur and was looking upwards if some words were spoken in Tamil , Mr.Patnaik added. While it was a concern for the organization to keep the mentally challenged child among the normal children without having any specially trained personnel to look after , he found a friend in Wasim Akram , yet another mentally challenged child who was rescued from Banabharati colony at Koraput in September last year . For some unknown reasons both of them found intimacy in each one of them and stayed & played together .
Open shelter was meant for a short stay of the rescued children by agencies including the police after which they need to be rehabilitated in the society by joining some schools and hostel . But the problem with PK & Wasim was that they were mentally challenged children and there was no special school for them in Koraput region where children around 14 years could be kept , Mr.Patnaik said . Further the problem turned out to be more complex when the ossification report of Wasim was received from the district headquarter hospital . It said that he was not 14 but in reality had reached 22 years of age even if he had a younger look . Now that Wasim was known to be more than 18 years of age , he was not be kept in the shelter home as per the guidelines . But it was a very hard task to ask him to leave the open shelter very well knowing that he was mentally challenged and rarely could go back to his unknown home in an unknown destination , Mr.Patnaik added.
It was a real-time challenge for the system to rehabilitate such children for the lack of proper child care institutions in the region at a time when number of mentally challenged children were dropping in to the little town every now and then opening the doors of trains entering from destinations like Kolkota , Bhubaneswar , Raipur and Visakhapatnam , said Rajashree Das , District Child protection Officer (DCPO) , Koraput while seeking the state if it could come up with concrete measures to meet such challenges in the region .
