Posters to warn people of baby thefts | Mumbai news - Hindustan Times
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Posters to warn people of baby thefts

Hindustan Times | ByBhavika Jain, Mumbai
Nov 09, 2010 01:09 AM IST

Less than a month after a burqa-clad woman walked away with a two-month-old boy from the civic-run VN Desai Hospital in Santacruz (East), the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has decided to paste posters at public places to create awareness about such incidents.

Less than a month after a burqa-clad woman walked away with a two-month-old boy from the civic-run VN Desai Hospital in Santacruz (East), the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has decided to paste posters at public places to create awareness about such incidents.

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SV Kulkarni, a security officer posted at the Byculla ward office, and his wife, Sunita, who is a commercial artist, designed and printed 1,500 posters in a week.

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The posters, in three designs, urge people to keep their children as close to them as they would keep their valuables in a crowded place.

“The idea behind these posters is to tell people that there have been incidents of babies being stolen from hospitals and so they should take care of their children,” said Chandrashekhar Rokade, deputy municipal commissioner (security).

The campaign follows the theft of Puja and Avdesh Mishra’s two-month-old boy, Ayush, from VN Desai hospital in October.

A burqa-clad woman allegedly walked away with the baby after befriending his grandmother.

The poster shows a woman, with her face covered, walking away with a baby.

“I have taken all the pictures that we have used in the posters. We made sure that we made women security officers pose for the photographs to avoid any problems later,” said Kulkarni, who has been working with the BMC for 26 years.

Civic officials said after the incident, the BMC will be reviewing footage from closed-circuit television (CCTVs) cameras in all the hospitals and will be checking if more CCTVs need to be installed.

The security officers will be surveying hospitals to check whether the CCTVs are in place. If they are damaged, they will be replaced.

“We are going to inspect all the hospitals to check the working of all the CCTVs,” said another security officer, requesting anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the media.

The Bombay High Court had in May 2009 framed guidelines to ensure no child is stolen from a public hospital. They were put in place after Mohini and Mohan Nerurkar’s three-day-old son was stolen from Sion hospital in January 2009.

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