A newborn girl was found abandoned in bushes near Gau Ghat in Sidhi district on Friday evening and taken to the district hospital, making it the second such case reported in the district within a month. The incident has again drawn attention to Madhya Pradesh’s six-year run at the top of the national infant abandonment count, according to NCRB data cited by the Times of India.
The one-to-two-day-old infant was found within the limits of Kamarji police station after a local resident heard a baby crying from a patch of bushes at around 5.30pm. When he approached the spot, he found the girl abandoned. Local residents took the infant to Sidhi district hospital and informed the police.
The child was handed over to hospital authorities at about 8pm and admitted for medical care. Doctors were closely monitoring her condition. Kamarji police station in-charge Sudhakar Singh told the Times of India that the newborn was stable and had been shifted to the hospital promptly by local residents, before police teams reached the location.
“The newborn is in stable condition and is admitted at district hospital. Fortunately, the infant was shifted immediately to hospital after being sighted. The locals had rushed her to hospital even before our teams reached there,” Singh said.
Police had not yet registered a case when the report was published. Singh said the case diary was at the district hospital and that a case would be registered against an unidentified person for abandonment of an infant once it was received.
The incident follows another case reported in Sidhi on October 27. In that case, villagers found a newborn girl alive in bushes near Akda nullah in the Sihawal area after hearing her cries while they were digging for white clay. That child was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit at Sidhi district hospital.
The two incidents in one month have occurred against a wider pattern recorded in official crime data. Madhya Pradesh reported 146 infant abandonment cases in 2024, the highest number among states for the sixth consecutive year, according to NCRB figures cited in the report. The state recorded 187 cases in 2019, 186 in 2020, 159 in 2021, 174 in 2022, 140 in 2023 and 146 in 2024.
The figures show that the annual count has fluctuated but remained persistently high, with Madhya Pradesh recording more than 140 cases in each of the six years listed. The latest Sidhi case has brought the issue back into focus as authorities continue the process of identifying the person responsible and ensuring medical care for the infant.
