Kannur: A tabla player, Sasikumar C G (66), who brought home a 14-year-old girl under foster care, was sentenced to 44 years of rigorous imprisonment for sexually assaulting her after confining her for three days and impregnating her.

While the prosecution accused his live-in partner of helping conceal the crime and forcibly terminating the girl’s pregnancy at home, the court acquitted her for lack of evidence.

But the case uncovered something even the survivor did not know about herself. During the police investigation into the abuse, officers discovered that the girl’s closest friend in the child care centre, the one she had turned to for comfort and protection, was in fact her biological sister, from whom she had been separated as a toddler, only to be unknowingly reunited years later in another state-run institution in Ernakulam.

In a separate order, the same Thalassery Special POCSO Court also sentenced the tabla player to seven years in prison for attempting to sexually assault the younger sister, who had come to the house to comfort her.

Now aged 24 and 22, the sisters are trying to rebuild their lives. The younger sister is pursuing a BSc Nursing degree, with her education being sponsored by a well-wisher. The elder has received coaching for competitive examinations and has already made it to two rank lists.

“They have only one dream now. They want to get jobs, find a home, and live together as sisters before they get married."

The court was scathing in its indictment of the Ernakulam Child Welfare Committee (CWC), then headed by P Padmaja Nair, for handing over a child for foster care without even basic background verification. Records later showed that the convict had abandoned his first wife and two children, had multiple relationships, and was living with another woman outside marriage when the survivor was given to them for foster care.

Though the combined sentence totals 44 years, the terms will run concurrently, meaning Sasikumar will serve 20 years in prison.

Additional Public Prosecutor Adv P M Bhasuri and investigating officer Inspector Binu Mohan P A said they would press for an appeal against the acquittal of Rathnakumari P R (64), Sasikumar’s live-in partner.

The crimes date back to 2016, a year after Sasikumar and Rathnakumari, residents under Kuthuparamba police limits, brought the girl home under foster care through the Ernakulam CWC. The house belonged to Rathnakumari, a retired government clerk.

The girl remained in their foster care from 2015 to 2019, Adv Bhasuri said. “In 2016, he locked her inside the house and repeatedly assaulted her for three days,” she said. During the four years she remained in his foster care, he continued to make sexually loaded remarks to her and would lock her inside the house whenever he went out, the prosecutor said.

In 2016, when the couple suspected the girl had become pregnant, Rathnakumari allegedly took her to a hospital in Thalassery. When the pregnancy test came back positive, Rathnakumari allegedly left the hospital with the girl, whose age had been falsely recorded as 21.

Back home, the prosecutor said, the girl’s diet was cut down. She was allegedly made to drink raw papaya juice daily, fed raw papaya, and forced into physical exertion to induce miscarriage. “Then she tied a heavy stone to her abdomen and made her do household work. She was told that once the pregnancy was terminated, she could continue living in the house,” Adv Bhasuri said.

She eventually suffered a miscarriage.

During that period, the girl called her “best friend” -- a child from the same care institution, two years younger -- to come and stay with her.

“She thought if her friend was around, he would stop abusing her,” Adv Bhasuri said.

But when Sasikumar allegedly tried to assault the younger girl too, the survivor intervened. “She told him not to do to her what he had done to her,” the prosecutor said. She also begged the younger girl not to report anything to the Ernakulam CWC, saying she no longer had the strength to fight.

But in 2019, during counselling by the CWC, the younger girl spoke about the attempted assault on her and about what had happened to her friend.

That was the first time the crime surfaced. But the complaint reached the police after more than a year in January 2021. Kuthuparamba police registered a POCSO case against Sasikumar and Rathnakumari. Both were arrested in January 2021 and spent three months in judicial custody.

Inspector Binu Mohan, now with the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau in Kannur, said the three-year delay made the investigation especially difficult. “One of the first things in a POCSO case is to establish the survivor’s age. To do that, we had to trace their past,” he said.

That search took officers through multiple child care institutions in Ernakulam, Thrissur and Kottayam districts. Eventually, they reached an orphanage in Kottayam that had shut down in 2005 after its founder, Thomas, died. “We were running two parallel investigations to trace the roots of both girls. We went back 18 years, and both trails ended at Thomas’s orphanage,” the officer said.

When the orphanage closed, its records had been shifted to another child care centre.

There, police found a handwritten letter from the girls’ biological mother, who had left them there at the ages of three and one, asking Thomas 'chettan' to care for them. A nun, who found the girls at the orphanage, took a photograph of them on the first day and filed it along with the mother's letter. Their father had died, and the mother married another person, police said. “That is how we established they were sisters,” Binu Mohan said.

After Thomas’s orphanage shut down, the sisters had been moved to separate institutions and lost touch. But in 2015, while studying in Classes VIII and VI, they were reunited in another child care institution in Ernakulam. They became close friends without knowing they were sisters.

“Before the police discovered the truth, I would often ask them how they had the same father’s name, and they would laugh it off,” Adv Bhasuri said.

The second major challenge was proving the pregnancy. At that stage, police had no evidence beyond the girl’s statement. “She spoke about the stone tied to her abdomen and being fed only raw papaya. It was disturbing, but we believed her,” the officer said.

Because the survivor could not remember the hospital, the police went through pregnancy records from hospitals across Kannur district for 2016 and 2017.

At the hospital in Thalassery, one entry caught Binu Mohan’s attention. “It matched the time frame. The name was a variation of the survivor’s. The age was falsely entered as 21, and the address was different. But the phone number belonged to Rathnakumari,” he said.

Police verified the number through the cyber cell. “That established that she had taken the girl to the hospital, and that the pregnancy test was positive.”

That led police to book the second accused. Through her, they built the case against Sasikumar.

Court slams CWC
The court came down heavily on the Ernakulam CWC for handing over the child without conducting even the most basic enquiries mandated under foster care rules.

When the foster care file was summoned, the CWC chairman appeared before the court in December 2025. But the file contained only the foster care application and period details. There were no pre-enquiry reports, no home visit records, no counselling reports, and no follow-up documents.

The court concluded that the child had been entrusted “without conducting any enquiry and complying with the rules and regulations of foster care and the Juvenile Justice Act.”

Adv P M Bhasuri said the couple had screened off their compound with tin sheets, with only an anganwadi near the house.

Inspector Binu Mohan said he had brought the lapses of the CWC to the attention of K K Shailaja, who then was the Minister for Women and Child Development. Even after the girl left the house in 2019, she returned to care for Rathnakumari P R when the woman met with a motor accident and was admitted to the ICU. “That shows the goodness of her heart,” said Adv P M Bhasuri.

Bhasuri said Rathnakumari was left with severe mobility issues after the accident and could not stand even for a second without support. She would frequently collapse during the trial proceedings. “Maybe that is why the court showed her some leniency,” the prosecutor said.