Forced To Leave Son As Collateral For Rs 25,000 Loan, Woman Finds Him In Grave

A duck rearer in Andhra Pradesh’s Tirupati and his family have been arrested for keeping a woman and her three children from a tribal community as bonded labourers over a Rs 25,000 loan, making her leave her son behind as “collateral” and then secretly burying his body in another state, claiming he had died of jaundice. 

When the woman finally managed to arrange the money – with exorbitant interest – that the man  had sought, he told her the boy had run away. It was only after a case was filed and the man was questioned that he revealed the boy had died and he had buried the body near his in-laws’ house in Tamil Nadu’s Kanchipuram. 

On Tuesday, as the police exhumed the boy’s body, the woman sat on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably. 

Anakamma, her husband Chenchaiah, and their three sons, who are all from the Yanadi tribal community, worked for a year for the duck rearer in Tirupati. Chenchaiah died, but the employer continued to make Ankamma and her three children work for him, telling them they could not leave because her husband had taken a Rs 25,000 loan from him. 

Officials said Ankamma and all three children were made to work very long hours and she pleaded for higher wages, but the duck rearer refused. When she insisted that she wanted to leave, he demanded Rs. 45,000 – with Rs 20,000 as interest – as repayment of the loan. She asked for 10 days to arrange the money, but was told that she would have to leave one of her children behind as collateral. Left with no option, she reluctantly agreed.