New Delhi

Forgotten children of Nithari

Exactly two years after the Nithari killings rocked the nation highlighting the apathetic attitude of the police towards the problem of missing children, a demonstration outside Delhi Police Headquarters earlier this week against alleged police inaction on complaints of missing children showed that the issue still figures low on the authorities’ priority list.

Similarly, a large number of people staged a dharna outside the Welcome police station a fortnight ago to attract the attention of the police towards the growing number of cases of missing children in their area. The common refrain of the protesters, mostly kith and kin of the missing children, ranged from delay in registration of FIRs and lackadaisical attitude of the police towards their complaints to attempts to shield the culprits.

Summing up the situation, Deepchand, whose teenaged son has been missing for more than a month now, said: “Several children have gone missing from our locality in the past few months, but the police do not seem interested in looking out for them. Most of these children are suspected to have been kidnapped by a gang and sold off to eunuchs. Even the police know this, but they are reluctant to take action.”

It was, perhaps, for the first time that the problem of missing children caught the attention of the political class and the media in a big way after the macabre killings of little children in Noida’s Nithari village came to light. But no lessons seem to have been learnt from the colossal tragedy.

As per National Human Rights Commission figures, more than 45,000 children go missing across the country every year. And the non-government organisations working in the field estimate that only 10 per cent of all cases are registered, so the actual numbers could be much higher, the report says. In Delhi itself, 14,411 people, including 6,683 minors, were reported missing in 2006.

As generally seen, the police do not feel that tracing a missing child is a priority for them and prefer to investigate cognisable offences because they show up in the annual crime figures. When the kin of a missing child approaches the police to register a case, the police prefer to make a daily diary entry and issue the complainant a non-cognisable receipt, telling them that a “case” had been registered. Since an FIR adds to the crime statistics and also adds to the burden of the police, policemen tend to nip the trouble in the bud as it were.

Hence an urgent need to sensitise the police force and reduce its workload. Technology could also be a possible answer. The Delhi police experiment shows that following computerisation of missing persons’ data, the percentage of tracing out missing persons has gone up to 55.27 per cent from 25 per cent earlier.

Besides, the authorities also need to put in place a technically equipped force to check crimes like trafficking of children, child prostitution, child pornography and illegal human organs trade which are there against the backdrop of the problem of missing children.

Last but not the least, society itself cannot afford to be a mute spectator to the apathetic attitude of the authorities towards the all-important issue of missing children and there is need to launch a sustained campaign to fix accountability.

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