Police personnel are known for their tough image, but the men in uniform in Madhya Pradesh are showing their humane side and donning a new role - saviours of newborn babies dumped by their parents.

Besides their routine task of maintaining law and order and controlling crime, they are also rescuing abandoned children and literally giving them a new lease of life. As many as 402 newborns, mostly girls, were found abandoned at various places in the state in the last 29 months. They were taken to hospitals in time by personnel of Dial-100, an emergency service of the Madhya Pradesh Police introduced to help people in distress, an official said.