Lucknow, April 9: The child dubbed “Mowgli Girl”, “Jungle Girl” and “Van (Forest) Durga” has turned out to be a nine-year-old girl from Kamlapur village in Uttar Pradesh’s Jaunpur, 285km south of the forests where she was found on January 20.

It now appears that the child was not brought up by monkeys, as doctors have told media after local journalists “discovered” her at the Bahraich district hospital last week, but suffers from a mental illness. The story was picked by foreign media and parallels were drawn with  “Mowgli”, the “man cub” in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. The Telegraph had published a photograph filed by a news agency.

Hamid Ali Shah, who identified himself as the girl’s grandfather, told The Telegraph today:  “She had disappeared from home on March 28 last year. I’ve no idea where she was all these days and how she reached the forest in Bahraich.”
Hamid and the girl’s uncle Bhullar Shah had arrived at Bahraich last evening after seeing her pictures on television and newspapers, and were redirected to the Lucknow orphanage where the government had shifted her yesterday.

A group of forest officials called “watchers” had spotted the girl in the Motipur Range at the Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary, and she was brought to the Bahraich hospital where she spent more than two months without drawing attention.
But media reports last week quoted doctors at the hospital and district administration officials as saying she had been “brought up by monkeys”, leading to her being dubbed “Mowgli Girl”.

The doctors and other hospital employees were quoted as saying she crawled on all fours, tended to scream and attack when approached by humans, and spoke no language — all of which Hamid denied except the last.

 

"She was falsely dubbed as a girl reared by monkeys. I heard doctors and senior government officials on television comparing her with animals. They tried to simplify the case to shrug off their responsibility to identify the child," Hamid said.

He said the girl was one of his son's six daughters. Her father, who also has a son, works in Delhi.

"We had registered a missing person case at the local Mungra Badshahpur police station the day (the girl) disappeared," Hamid said. "She would have returned home long before had people in responsible posts shown some honesty and sincerity."

Dr D.K. Singh, the chief medical superintendent at Bahraich district hospital, told local reporters today that the documents shown by Hamid, such as her birth certificate and pictures, appeared authentic.

"But the district authorities will have to check them before handing the child over," he said. Hamid said he was ready for a DNA test.

Dr S.S. Ghapola, the doctor in charge of Nirvan, the NGO-run orphanage where the girl has been brought, said it would be better for her to stay in his institution.

"We run a rehabilitation centre for orphans and other children with poor mental health. She needs lots of care to learn to live and grow well," he said. "This will not be possible if she is sent back home. Besides, she might disappear again."

Dr Ghapola suggested that the girl might have Down Syndrome, a genetic condition whose symptoms include a degree of intellectual disability, or some other mental illness. "It'll take a few more tests to identify her condition," he said.

Doctors blamed

A forest official who would not be quoted criticised doctors at the Bahraich hospital and district officials for their comments to the media.

Some of the doctors had been quoted as saying the girl would scatter her food on the floor and eat like an animal.

Ajay Deep Singh, district magistrate of Bahraich, had visited the hospital three days ago and dubbed her "Van Durga".

"The officials and doctors have no justification for their lackadaisical attitude towards a child without an identity, whose admission to the Bahraich district hospital remained unreported for more than two months because the district administration was busy with the February-March Assembly elections," the forest official said.

"Later, they developed cold feet when the girl was discovered by the local media, which further twisted the information about her."

He added: "It was Bahraich police's responsibility to file a case, but the administration and the police didn't start searching for her parents even more than two months after she had been found."

G.P. Singh, divisional forest officer of Bahraich, told this newspaper that he had been saying from the beginning that the girl could not have been reared by monkeys.

"She was found at a spot through which forest dwellers pass every day. The monkeys were actually about to attack her when she was rescued," Singh said.

"Many cameras have been installed in the forest to keep a watch on the animals and human activities. The watchers too keep a close vigil on the forest. She would have been spotted had she really been there for many years, or even months or weeks."

One of the child specialists treating the girl at the Bahraich hospital, Dr K.K. Verma, had been quoted in a media report as saying: "She is returning to normal; calling her Mowgli would be an injustice."

But Singh and Verma were largely ignored.