The coach of a six-year-old Indian boy who entered the record books last year when he ran 65km in seven hours was arrested on Monday and charged with torturing the child.
Biranchi Das, a fitness fanatic who runs a judo school in the eastern Indian city of Bhubaneshwar, was taken into police custody and faces allegations that he tied up and beat Budhia Singh, who had become a hero throughout the country.
Budhia’s mother, Sukanti Singh, says she found scars on her son’s body when he returned home 10 days ago after living with the coach for more than two years.
Despite having spent a year defending Das from government attempts to stop the boy racer, Budhia’s mother went on the radio on Monday saying that her son had been ”beaten” and ”mistreated”.
”Biranchi was beating him up regularly,” Singh said. ”He even once tied Budhia up from a ceiling fan and threw hot water on his body.”
Das denied the allegations, calling the charges ”a conspiracy against me hatched by the state government’s child welfare department”.
The coach’s arrest is the latest twist in a saga that has gripped India since a government order declared the child’s record-breaking 64km run last year to be ”torture”. Budhia was promptly banned from competitive running.
Doctors said the boy was being run into the ground. The medics, from the hospital in Orissa’s state capital, Bhubaneshwar, warned that the then four-year-old was ”undernourished, anaemic and under cardiological stress … If the boy continues to run for long distances it may aggravate his condition and result in renal failure”.
Das’s response was that Budhia could ”not be explained by science”.
The child endurance runner became a popular hero. His face filled newspaper front pages and at dawn camera crews would follow Budhia through the leafy, dusty streets of Bhubaneshwar as he pounded the tarmac in shorts with an old tyre tied to his waist by a rope.
Das, his coach, would cycle alongside and shout encouragement.
The publicity ensured a spate of copycat child athletes, many of whom collapsed in agony.
Aware of the growing pressure from the state and child activists, officials stopped Budhia from attempting a 480km ”walkathon” from Bhubaneshwar to Calcutta in West Bengal, to the dismay of locals who had turned up in their thousands to cheer the boy wonder.
Many say that money is at the root of the allegations against Das. Budhia was born in a slum; his father was a beggar and a drinker and his mother worked as a maid, washing dishes in other people’s homes. Budhia was sold off before he was one by his impoverished and illiterate mother for 800 rupees ($20). Rescued by Das, who scouts for athletic talent from poor backgrounds, Budhia ended up in rigorous sports training sessions and was hailed as a child prodigy.
Such was his success that Das set up the Budhia Singh Trust for the Welfare of Children, which was to fund slum children in sport and build a stadium named after Budhia. It was also meant to provide for the boy, his mother and his three sisters.
Police estimate that the trust is now worth ”lakhs of rupees” (thousands of dollars).
Children’s rights activists say the tragedy of Budhia is that no one seems concerned about his childhood. ”It is a circus. Budhia should have been taken into care by the government long ago. He has been robbed of a normal childhood,” said Kailash Satyarthi of Bachpan Bachao Andolan, which translates as Save Childhood Movement.
”He could have been sent to a school and looked after. Instead he ended up running and running. And now these allegations of beating turn up. Who has been looking after him?”
Das has told police that he suspects Budhia’s family decided to turn against him when he threw out the boy’s sister for getting ”involved” with one of his judo students.
”He said the mother came to him asking for money,” said Amitabh Mishra, superintendent of police in Bhubaneshwar. ”We are taking the allegations of abuse seriously but there are two sides to every story and we are waiting to see whether Budhia has been coached to tell tales.”
State officials have also begun to question whether, while able to excel at sports, Budhia was able to understand what was going on around him.
”We have interviewed mother and son today and the boy was surprisingly emaciated and mentally not a normal child,” said RM Mishra, chairperson of Bhubaneshwar’s child welfare committee. ”If he needs to be sent to a school we will do it. We will do it for his benefit.
Minor feats of endurance
Budhia ran from 16km to 48km a day, at an average 11,2km/h. Experts say children under five should run no more than 24km a week. Eighteen is the minimum age for most marathons, which are just over 41km long.
Copycat child racers have included Mrityunjaya Mandal, eight, who last September ran 59km before blacking out. Anastasia Barla (10) set out to try to run 104km but gave up, near collapse, after eight hours.
Biranchi Das, Budhia’s mentor, has unorthodox beliefs when it comes to training. He claims that drinking water while running weakens athletes. Instead, he cycles just ahead of the runner, holding out a bottle of water as encouragement.
Das’s aim was to train Budhia for the 2016 Olympics. Despite having a population of more than a billion, India managed just one silver medal at the last Olympics. – Guardian Unlimited Â