Shahjahanpur, India —

Her arm was the first thing Shyam Babu saw, tiny and frail, poking through the mud like a discarded doll. But this was no doll. Covered with ants and bleeding from what doctors would later suspect were animal bites, the pig farmer had just made a terrifying discovery near a river in this north Indian village.

Wrapped in a towel, barely stirring, but slightly breathing, was a newborn baby girl buried beneath a foot of earth.

“I went closer and saw that the child’s fingers were moving. I went even closer and could sense a heartbeat,” Babu recalled as he retraced his steps leading to the horrific discovery last month in the sugarcane and paddy fields of rural Shahjahanpur district in Uttar Pradesh state.

“I realized the child was alive…. Someone had buried a baby a

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