Imagine this: an ordinary auto ride, a crying baby, and one man’s sixth sense that stopped a child trafficking racket in Tamil Nadu.
June 2, 2009. Tiruchi Government Hospital. Auto driver D Joseph picked up a woman with a baby heading to the bus stand. Just another trip — or so it seemed.
But minutes in, Joseph noticed something off. The baby cried uncontrollably, and the woman didn’t react like a mother. Something didn’t sit right.
Joseph could have ignored it. But instead, he turned back and drove straight to the hospital outpost, alerting the police deployed there.
At the same time, a young mother, Susila, rushed to the hospital screaming that a woman had taken her baby. The timelines matched perfectly.
Acting on Joseph's hunch, police nabbed the woman — Dhanam — and rescued the baby within hours. But what followed shocked everyone.
Interrogation revealed this wasn’t a one-off abduction. Dhanam was part of a larger racket stealing infants across Tamil Nadu.
Babies were being taken from hospitals, bus stands, and railway stations, then sold to unregistered adoption centres where fake birth certificates were prepared for quick “sales".
When the police raided one such centre, Anbu Illam in Tirunelveli, they rescued six babies in a single operation. More raids followed. More children were found.
Over the months, the CB-CID pieced together the racket. At least 12 stolen children were reunited with their real parents. Families got back babies they thought were lost forever.
And it all began because an auto driver chose not to look away. Joseph’s small act of alertness set off a chain reaction that dismantled a trafficking network. In India, where child trafficking remains a hidden crisis, stories like Joseph’s remind us: heroes aren’t only in uniforms. Sometimes, they’re behind the wheel of an auto.