In the SC Colony of Kalnacheruvu village, Kamavarapukotta mandal, Eluru district, a man ran a prayer hall called Emmanuel Prayer Hall. His name was Chavatapalli Rambabu, known also as Hosanna. He was trusted. He was a pastor. He was a predator.
According to police, Rambabu repeatedly sexually assaulted a minor girl on multiple occasions when her parents were away from home, and threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone. The assault continued not once, not twice, but multiple times in a village, in a community, in broad institutional daylight, while every system that should have protected this child was absent, inattentive, or simply not there.
When the case finally came to light, it took a Women Sub-Inspector SI Valli Padma of Tadikalapudi, to register a case under Section 6 of the POCSO Act and arrest the accused. The arrest has been welcomed. The commission intervened. Additional charges under the BNS have since been added. The machinery of the law has, belatedly, engaged.
The Commission’s Intervention: Proof of State Failure
The Andhra Pradesh State Commission for Protection of Child Rights took suo motu cognisance of the case. It directed district police to invoke stringent legal provisions. It directed the government to provide protection to the victim’s family and compensation to the minor. It is now monitoring the case.
Every one of these directives is a measure of what the state had not already done on its own. A statutory commission should not need to instruct a district police force to apply the full force of the law in a POCSO case involving a child from an SC colony. That instruction should be standard. It should be automatic. The fact that the commission had to issue it as a specific directive that police needed to be pushed to invoke stringent provisions, that additional BNS sections were registered only after commission intervention, reveals a police machinery that was moving cautiously, perhaps deferentially, until an outside body forced its hand.
The commission stated it is monitoring cases of child protection, sexual abuse, child labour, child marriages, and trafficking across AP, and coordinating with relevant departments for justice. This is a damning sentence. It means the commission is doing the work that the government’s own line departments — Women and Child Development, Social Welfare, and District Administration should be doing as their primary function. The commission is filling a vacuum. That vacuum is the TDP government’s creation.
The Warning That Should Have Been Governance
The commission’s public warning — that strict action will be taken against perpetrators of atrocities against women and children should not need to come from a commission. It should be the lived daily reality of governance. It should be a fact demonstrated by the fear in every potential abuser’s mind, not an announcement prompted by a specific case that broke in the media.
