Article Source: Times of India

Date of Issue: November 14, 2008

Author: Shreya Roy Chowdhury

Title of the article: When will these children return home?

Between 2000 & 2008, An NGO Received 8,172 Calls From Parents Looking For A Lost Child

Manish Kumar, an eight-year-old boy from Sangam Vihar in south Delhi, disappeared last March. His parents filed an FIR but with little results. Manish simply became another piece of statistic in the growing list of missing children.

Not every child like Manish will celebrate Children's Day on November 14. Statistics show that between Septembers of 2007 and 2008, 76,579 children went missing in India. Of them, 11,825 chil­dren have gone missing from Delhi alone.

The situation is so grim that Delhi government's department of social welfare recently brought out full-page advertisements carrying photographs of children separated from their parents. On October 1, a national daily carried the names of 43 girls. A similar ad dated November 11 showed 84 boys who had been 'separated from their families' and are currently with the government's department of social welfare.

"The children may wander off, be lured away by traffickers or kidnapped. If they are captured by traffickers, they may be used as forced labour, exploited sexually, sent to the Gulf countries as camel jockeys or child-brides, pushed into begging rackets and drug peddling or become victims of the organ trade," says Kailash Satyarthi of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), an NGO that has collated the statistics on missing children.

Not all children who are separated from their families are lost. "Sometimes sick children are abandoned by their parents. Unable to afford the treatment, they leave their kids at temples hoping that God will look after them," says Rita Panicker, di­rector, Butterflies, an NGO.

That's not all. A study conducted by Childline Delhi, a helpline for kids, shows that 33% of the total calls received between 2000-08 were about "missing children". NGOs in the field categorize missing children in two ways. In the first category are those kids who are found to be without adult supervision and who cannot get home on their own. The second group is made up of kids whose parents have reported their dis­appearance. Between 2000-08, Childline got 6,330 calls from people who had located a "lost child" and 8,172 calls from parents looking for a missing kid.

Formed in the wake of the Nithari killings, a Committee on Missing Children was established by the National Human Rights Commission on February 12,2007, to look into the issue. The committee's report noted that "despite the best efforts" of the government, "countless children go 'missing' every year". It also "observed that the juvenile justice system too has failed to provide due care and protection to children". "Nithari was a wake up call for us," says Panicker. But, Gerry Pinto, advisor and consultant with a number of NGOs in the city, says that while Nithari resulted in the creation of several commit­tees, they have very little to show for themselves.

Panicker says that nearly 80% of the lost children picked up by Childline NGOs are finally restored to their parents, "but very few of the children reported missing by their families are found". Adds Pinto, "There is no efficient, fool-proof system whereby missing children can be traced. There is no po­litical or administrative will, schemes are never translated into action, no one who can be held accountable for the condition of children in the city."

Activists also point out that the Children Welfare Committees are supposed to be present in every district as per the Juvenile Justice Act of 2000, have not been es­tablished everywhere. They also feel that maintaining databases even at the panchayat level will help track the movement of children and act as a deterrent to traffickers. "There were discussions on putting, up a national website. But the truth is that most of the children are from poor families who have no access to the web," says Panicker.

Child rights activist Sat­yarthi says that missing children is not a priority issue with the police. They usually belong to families of migrants from Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. He says that they are without ration cards, voter IDs or any other acceptable proof of identity and are es­pecially vulnerable.

He narrates the story of a young girl who went missing from Delhi and was found in Ajmer. She was being taken to the Gulf for marriage.

Experts say that with numerous slums and a steady influx of migrants, the poorer sections of the city are fertile hunting grounds for traffickers. Many kidnapped children are smuggled abroad to be married or work as domestic labour.

The NHRC committee report says that "complaints of missing children, by and large, are treated as any other non-cognizable offence and only an entry is made in the General Station Diary (GD) that is followed by an enquiry"

"The term 'missing children' is not appropriate," explains Satyarthi, as its legal connotation does not comprehend the crimes that are generally involved. But is anybody listening?