What you need to know
- Prakash, 39, left his family home in Coimbatore in 2003 aged about 16 after an argument with his brother over a two-wheeler.
- He was found in July 2022 by Apna Farz Sewa Society in Jasraur village, Ajnala subdivision, Amritsar district, near the Pakistan border.
- The organisation alleges he worked unpaid on a dairy farm for close to two decades, was kept with the cattle and chained at night.
- Retired Haryana Assembly Secretary Subhash Chander alerted Tamil journalist Muthaiya, who spent three years tracing the family.
- Coimbatore Collector Pavankumar G. Giriyappanavar ran document verification; Virudhunagar issued a native verification certificate.
- Patiala DC Himanshu Aggarwal has ordered compensation, rehabilitation and legal proceedings against those accused.
- No one has yet been named publicly as an accused and the allegations have not been tested in court.
A man from Tamil Nadu who disappeared from home as a teenager in 2003 has been reunited with his mother in Punjab, four years after a shelter organisation found him working unpaid on a dairy farm a short drive from the Pakistan border. Prakash, now 39, spent most of his adult life in a village whose name he could not recall, in a state whose language he did not speak.
How did a boy from Coimbatore end up in Amritsar district?
Prakash was around 16 when he walked out of the family home after an argument with his younger brother, Prabhu, over who owned a newly bought two-wheeler. The brothers were barely a year apart and quarrelled often. This time he did not come back.
His parents filed a missing person complaint. About two months later he telephoned a grocery shop near the house and told the shopkeeper he was in Chennai. He never contacted the family directly again.
The family had moved to Coimbatore from Poomalaipatti, a village near Aruppukottai in Virudhunagar district, roughly three decades ago looking for work. Prakash’s father, Rammurthy, worked as an electrician and a watchman and died of cancer in 2021. His mother, R. Sundari, now 68, leases a small plot where she grows vegetables and keeps a few cows. She has said she had come to assume her eldest son was dead.
What did the 2022 rescue uncover?
In July 2022, volunteers from Apna Farz Sewa Society, a Punjab shelter organisation headed by Pal Kharoud, removed Prakash from Jasraur village in the Ajnala subdivision of Amritsar district, close to the international border.
According to the organisation, he had been kept with the livestock he tended, chained at night and fed twice a day. Its account alleges he worked without wages on a dairy farm for close to two decades, slept on a bare iron cot and was locked into a room each night.
None of this has yet been tested in court, and no one has so far been named publicly as an accused. When he was brought to the organisation’s shelter at Lachkani village in Patiala district, staff say he was withdrawn and could barely speak. It took months of counselling before his memory began to return.
How was his family finally traced?
The search started with a retired civil servant. Subhash Chander, a former Secretary of the Haryana Legislative Assembly who volunteers at rehabilitation homes, met Prakash at the shelter and passed word to Muthaiya, a journalist based in the Palladam area of Tiruppur district in Tamil Nadu.
At first Prakash could offer only his first name and the state he came from. Asked which town, he would answer “Mumbai”. Over months, more surfaced, and eventually he produced the name of his ancestral village.
Muthaiya worked his way across Virudhunagar district asking after the family until he obtained a phone number for Vasuki, Sundari’s niece, who told him Sundari was living in Neelambur, on the outskirts of Coimbatore. It turned out to be about 25 kilometres from Muthaiya’s own village. He went to the house and showed her a photograph. She recognised her son immediately.
Why was he not simply sent home?
The shelter did not release him. When Muthaiya travelled to Punjab by train with Prabhu and a neighbour, Sundaralingam, staff initially declined to let them meet him; the meeting went ahead after Chander intervened. Prakash recognised his brother on sight and ran to him.
Even then the organisation refused to hand him over without documentary proof of the relationship, saying it did not want to risk returning a vulnerable resident to an unsafe household. The family was told to come back with papers.
What did the two district administrations do?
On 13 July, Sundari raised the case at a public grievance meeting with the Coimbatore District Collector, Pavankumar G. Giriyappanavar. Officials from the Labour Department, the School Education Department and the Coimbatore Corporation went through decades-old records, matching school admission entries, old ration cards and current family documents. The Virudhunagar district administration issued a native verification certificate confirming that Sundari and Prakash belong to Poomalaipatti. Sundari also identified her son over a video call.
The Collector then wrote to the Deputy Commissioner of Patiala seeking help with the handover, and the two administrations completed the custody transfer late last month.
Will anyone be prosecuted?
Patiala Deputy Commissioner Himanshu Aggarwal said he had instructed the Labour Department and the Social Security, Women and Child Development Department in the district to ensure Prakash receives the compensation and rehabilitation benefits he is entitled to, and to begin legal proceedings against those accused of holding him in bonded labour.
India abolished bonded labour in law with the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976, and a central scheme provides cash assistance and rehabilitation to released labourers once a district administration certifies them as such. Convictions, however, remain rare. The shelter has said it will leave it to Prakash and his family to decide whether to pursue a case or a compensation claim.
A recurring problem in the border belt
Cases of this kind have repeatedly been flagged in Punjab’s border districts, among them Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Ferozepur and Fazilka. In 2021 the Union Home Ministry, drawing on Border Security Force reporting, raised concerns about migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh being exploited on farms in border villages after being recruited through contractors on promises of better pay.
What the case illustrates is how little the enforcement machinery contributed. Prakash was not found by a labour inspection or a police check. He was found because volunteers happened to look, and identified because a retired official and a small-town journalist kept at it for three years. For everyone traced this way, the assumption has to be that others are not.
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