India's Covid Orphans

Pleas for help are flooding social media platforms, potentially putting parentless children at risk

- Cristina Lindblad

In early May, Mumbai resident Akancha Srivastava noticed something unusual. Her social media handles and the chatbot on the website of the nonprofit she runs were swamped with anguished appeals to help children orphaned by India’s ferocious second wave of Covid-19, which has claimed more than 150,000 lives just in the past two months. Veering from her usual work of promoting cyber safety, the thirtysomething engineer assembled a team of eight and set up a WhatsApp Covid helpline for children in distress. Within hours after the number went live on May 3, Bollywood stars, TV personalities, and police chiefs shared it on social media. Panicked messages began flooding in from Delhi, Mumbai, and distant small towns.

“People were asking us to rescue orphaned children, alerting us about illegal adoption rackets and child trafficking,” says Srivastava, whose helpline has been logging 3,500 to 4,000 messages daily. Her team is working with authorities to locate relatives or place children in already overflowing state-run shelter homes. “The children are in shock,” she says. “They don’t understand what’s happening.”