Screengrab of the viral video showing the girl in distress.
Her hands and legs are tied with a rope. Abandoned on the roof of a house under a beating sun, the five-year-old writhes and struggles to free herself. And then she starts screaming in pain as the heat apparently makes her skin burn.
This video of a child from Delhi went viral on the internet on Wednesday, prompting the Delhi police to track her family. It turned out that this was "punishment" given by the mother.
At first, social media posts said the video was from Karawal Nagar locality from June 2. But police did not find any such incident there. It later got the information that the video was from Khajuri Khas area. When quizzed by the police, the mother said she had punished her daughter "only for 5-7 minutes" for not having completed her school homework.
In the 25-second video purportedly shot from a nearby house, a woman, a woman says in the background that the mother had left the child on the roof in sweltering heat around 2 pm.
Police later tweeted that appropriate action has been initiated.
When the video first surfaced online in a tweet, social media users demanded that "exemplary punishment" be given to those responsible. When it later turned out that the girl was in fact being punished by her mother, many expressed shock at the "inhumanity" and suggested that the woman be counselled too.
Some demanded that the mother be tied up and left in the sun "to know what her daughter felt".