NEW DELHI: Official data put out by the Union Home Ministry of India in Parliament last month shows that over 3.25 lakh children went missing between 2011 and 2014 (till June) at an average of nearly 1 lakh children going missing every year- exposing the sheer neglect and apathy of the administration in tracing its own lost young, most of who, it is believed become victims of human trafficking and sexual violence, often with police connivance.
When the issue came up at the Supreme Court of India, on February 5, 2013, an angry bench questioned the government’s apathy towards the over 1.7 lakh children reported missing at that instance. “Nobody seems to care about missing children. This is the irony, the court observed. Tragically, nothing appears to have changed since then.
Almost one and a half years later, government data reveals over 1.5 lakh more children have gone missing, and the situation remains the same with an average of 45% of them remaining untraced. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), in fact, says, this means, one child goes missing in India every eight minutes.
More worryingly, 55% per cent of those missing are girls and 45% of all missing children have remained untraceable as yet, raising fears of them having been either killed or pushed into begging or prostitution rackets.
TOI reports that, according to the data, Maharashtra is one of the worst states in terms of missing children with over 50,000 having disappeared in the past three and half years. Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh are distant competitors with all recording less than 25,000 missing children for the period.
The more disturbing trend that seems consistent in all states that have reported the data is that all of them have more missing girls than boys. In Maharashtra, 10,000 more girls went missing than boys. In Andhra Pradesh, the number of girls missing (11,625) is almost double of boys (6,915). Similarly, Madhya Pradesh has over 15,000 girls missing compared to around 9,000 boys. Delhi, too, has more girls (10,581) missing compared to boys (9,367).
Experts say several children from rural India and among the urban poor, run away from home due to poverty or physical abuse. Once on the street, without protection, they could be pushed into any racket or abused.
What’s worse is that in the law and order machinery there is no special focus on tracing of missing children. In fact, in the states with a missing persons’ bureau in their police department, good officers are seldom posted as it’s not considered a coveted division.
The Justice Verma Committee formed to look into amendments required in criminal law, following the massive outpouring of public anger, over the brutal gang-rape in Delhi of a young woman in 2012, also highlighted the huge problem of Indias missing children. “A lakh kids go missing every year. The police must file an FIR, DM should maintain records,” Justice JS Verma had said. Citing the case of a minor girl who was trafficked from Jharkhand to Delhi, made to work for a year without pay and then trafficked again to Punjab, the Commission had observed that most missing children are victims of human trafficking and sexual violence, often with police connivance.
Last year, Delhi reported the largest number of untraced children as 14 kids went missing from the city every day. Police simply claimed most were cases of children running away willingly, rarely investigating allegations of child trafficking and sexual abuse.
Activist AR Chaurasia said, “The police shuts the case saying that the child ran away and came back on his own. My question is what did the child do for four years? Someone must have employed him, why don’t they probe it?”
Even in relative terms, when compared to the situation in neighbouring countries, the situation is alarming in India, in its sheer magnitude. In Pakistan, for instance, official figures suggest around 3,000 children go missing annually.
If population is an issue, then one could look at China, the most populous nation, where official figures put the number of missing children at around 10,000 every year. Indias statistics- which is ten-fold, clearly shames everyone. Most of all, itself.
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